IFFCO, Airtel hand power to the villages

NEW DELHI: Technology is going places. And guiding it to India���s far-flung villages is a joint venture between IFFCO and Airtel. On Friday, IFFCO subsidiary IFFCO Kisan Sanchar and Bharti Airtel form a joint venture for rural telephony, which will take gadgets and services to the countryside, where power is in short supply. Transistors, community radios, mobiles and torches which don���t rely on power ��� you name it, they got it.

The JV will use IFFCO���s co-operative network for marketing telephone services while Bharti will be the service provider. The early targets could be tech-wannabes in rural Uttar Pradesh, who are already familiar with some of these products, thanks to a pilot project conducted late last year. The services are available in several districts of Tamil Nadu as well. The JV, according to sources, is targeting 20% growth every year and expects some 150 million customers by 2011.

The JV will bring several hand-cranked products of common use. These include transistors, community radios and torches. There will also be lanterns with a battery life of three years. The wind-up transistors were invented in 1996 and are now used in several African nations. The hand-powered radio on offer will be a world-first. Some of the wind-up products are marketed worldwide by UK���s Freeplay.

For last year���s pilot projects, the mobile phones were partly sourced from Sinocell. The wide-screen BlackBerry-lookalike, which can access e-mail to commodity prices to agricultural inputs, was priced at around Rs 4,000. The small-screen version may cost around Rs 2,000.

Phones from Alcatel, Samsung and Phillips will also be sold at lower rates, but IFFCO could launch its own brand later. The power-free, wind-up charger will be a boon for the power-strapped rural user.

Around 3-7 minutes hand-cranking a day can charge the phones. The charger will come free with the mobile phones, which will sport SIM cards branded IFFCO-Airtel Green Card. A two-year warranty for handsets, after-sales service for farmers and wide rural connectivity after Airtel sets up enough towers are also on the cards.