I have been feeling guilty of putting the updates on this blog aside for quite some time now. As it happens with quite a lot of activities I get involved in, if the time has passed beyond the end of the activity, it is always difficult to come back to finish the pending things since something interesting and challenging comes up in the queue and consumes most of the time.
During the past few months, I have had several thoughts going through my mind looking back on the trip and experiences I had. And I just thought it will be good to write a few blogs at least summarizing some of the experiences during the trip that I have not yet shared.
I will begin with this blog to just give some update on what I have been through in these past 7 months post trip and will follow up (hopefully regularly) with blogs on sharing some experiences at the broad level.
I was more confused with the role of technology for development after the trip than before the trip. I will cover this aspect in detail in a blog later. Thinking more during the confused state led to the decision of joining Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi (IIIT-Delhi) as a faculty – http://www.iiitd.edu.in/~amarjeet/.
In my new position, I wanted to work on some technology solutions that can help improve delivery of basic services to a general or a specialized group. To this effect, we started working on developing mobile based solution for healthcare. In this work, we are currently collaborating with a group at MIT called Sana and developing a mobile client that can be used to send health related information to a backend server. This information can then be accessed by a doctor sitting remotely and he/she can either diagnose remotely or ask for a patient’s visit (or more information about the patient). Parts of this project were floated as summer internships and the work of student interns in the past 2-3 months is nothing less than impressive.
We also started working on voice based value added services for farmers with a subsidiary of one of the biggest fertilizer cooperative. Several insights from this work have helped in developing a good understanding of ground realities of making a project of this scale self sustainable.
The developments in the last 6-7 months in this direction of exploring different technology solutions has been very satisfying on personal front and have far exceeded my expectations. However, another reason for taking up this position was to explicitly find time to involve myself more closely in some grassroots level activities to further my learning from the trip. This direction really took a backseat since then and I am very positive that I would be able to come back and work on moving it further as well.
Thats a broad updated on developments at my end in the past 6-7 months. I sincerely hope to regularly update this blog with some overall experiences from the trip that I would like to share with everyone.
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