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Technology | How Google?s Bicycle-Riding Internet Tutors Are Getting Rural Indian Women Online -Newley Purnell

How Google?s Bicycle-Riding Internet Tutors Are Getting Rural Indian Women Online -Newley Purnell

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published Published on Oct 3, 2016   modified Modified on Oct 3, 2016
-Wall Street Journal Blogs

Since the program's launch last year, about 9,000 guides have helped reached 1 million women

The Alphabet Inc. unit has built an army of thousands of female trainers and sent them to the far corners of the Subcontinent on two-wheelers, hoping to give rural woman their first taste of the web. Each bike has a box full of connected smartphones and tablets for women to try and train on.

The idea is to give people who have never even sent an email a better understanding of how being connected could improve their lives. Families that can afford to be online often chose not to be because they do not see the value. Meanwhile women are sometimes blocked by their families from new technology.

Bhagwati Kumari Mahawar got her very first taste of the internet just a month ago.

The 19-year-old used a smartphone Google brought to her remote village in the desert state of Rajasthan to search for designs of mehndi, the elaborate henna designs Indian women get on their hands and feet. Then she looked up information on how to sew a blouse.

“I really wanted to learn,” she said, sitting in the shade near the Google bicycle and a water buffalo.

In the project, called Internet Saathi, Google partnered with local philanthropy Tata Trusts to show women in rural India how to connect to the web.

Instructors are trained in how the web works, and then are given bicycles with large boxes on the back containing internet-enabled devices running Google’s Android mobile operating system. The newly equipped “saathis” — or “partners” in Hindi — then cycle from village to village providing instruction to their peers.

“I wasn’t sure if I could do it or not,” said the instructor who helped Ms. Mahwar get online, 30-year-old Kamla Devi Mahawar, who is unrelated to her pupil.

She never used the web until she began her Saathi training ten months earlier, but since then has enjoyed showing women how to search for information like recipes and stitching guides, and showing them how to use voice queries if they are unable to type in text.

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Wall Street Journal, 3 October, 2016

Wall Street Journal, 3 October, 2016, http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2016/10/03/how-googles-bicycle-riding-internet-tutors-are-getting-rural-indian-women-online/


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