Trouble-mongers will think twice before creating nuisance within polling booth premises during the Assembly elections in West Bengal as live videos of more than 1,000 critical booths will be directly monitored by the Election Commission through ‘web-casting.' The general public will also be able to stream the live videos by logging on to the West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer's site. A first-time initiative in the State elections, the technique will be put...

The telecom ministry is likely to provide rural wireless broadband connections to over 5 lakh villages in one-and-a-half years The telecom ministry is likely to provide rural wireless broadband connections to over 5 lakh villages in one-and-a-half years and will provide a subsidy to both state-owned and private service providers operators from the Universal Service Obligation Fund for this purpose. “Wireless broadband to cover about five lakh villages... time period, you see,...

Why don’t we see more Indian language content on the internet? For instance, there are over 200 odd million people who can read and write in Hindi. But Hindi doesn’t figure in any listing of the top ten languages used on the internet globally. Japanese, a cussedly difficult language to read or write, makes it to the top five. This, from a country with less than one-tenth the population of India. It...

Urbanization comes with its share of problems. Your new job lands you in a new city and you need necessities such as a mobile connection, a broadband connection or a bank account transfer as soon as possible. Your only hope in such cases till now is maybe a letter from the employer authenticating your address. Enter UID, the unique identity project headed by Nandan Nilekani, which promises to give an acceptable...

Infosys Technologies' Founder-Chairman N.R. Narayana Murthy on Thursday called for information and communication technology (ICT) being used in agriculture and rural sectors for more inclusive growth. "We have seen a lot of growth in ICT and it will grow at a higher rate in the future. The sector is constantly growing in India. But there is a need for adoption of ICT in agriculture and rural sectors. ICT adoption in these...