Intel Eyes Rural India Date:   Thursday , January 06, 2011 What is Intel’s biggest challenge in Indian market and how do plan to address it? The PC penetration of India is comparatively less as opposed to that of China, Australia and Japan. Every 10 percentage increase in broadband connectivity and PC penetration will have a significant impact on the GDP of the country. Thus, PC connectivity, broadband and people utilizing these, are all linked to the economic growth of this country, be it in the consumer segment or in the SMB segment. Thus, the biggest challenge that Intel faces in the Indian market today is how to increase the PC penetration and resolving this will be our biggest mission in the next couple of years. Multiple factors need to fall into place in order to make a change in the issue of PC penetration. First among these is ‘connectivity’. In India, the broadband penetration is just 8-10 percent, much smaller when compared to other countries. But the roll out of 3G wireless services will make a huge difference. Today customers not only want a PC but rather a connected PC and how one optimizes it and hits the market will be a big initiative. That is something that we are focusing on. The second is how the customers are going to use the PC once they have it. A good percentage of common man does not speak English so we need to get vernacular content in the PC. At Intel, we are working to achieve this. We work with various service providers and application vendors, and have an initiative called app up stores where we will create vernacular content and applications and reach out to people. This will make sure the PC is relevant for the common man. Another initiative is ePCO, where we work with the government of Karnataka, BSNL and ItzCash. There are about 5000 PCOs in Karnataka, and all these are given an option to upgrade themselves to ePCOs. With this we aim to drive self-employment, bridge the digital divide and increase IT adoption in semi-urban and rural areas. What are you looking to do in mobile device segment like Tablets and other hand held devices? We are working on different plans for this segment. At present, we are working in a concept stage for multiple end customers for hand held devices. In the rural India there is a lot of work that is done on paper but can be computed. Today, from the Centre of Statistics Organization (CSO), a statistician goes acre by acre to calculate the acreage of paddy in a village, then get his numbers to national statistics and the government uses this to estimate whether the paddy supply and demand are met or not. Similarly, in healthcare department, representatives go village by village to find out infant mortality rate. All this is paper driven work. Taking this into account we have developed an interface which will have a fingerprint reader, a small screen, keyboard and a printer, and can be used for microfinance and other statistics computing. So if a person goes into a village with this and connects it with the core server through broadband or 3G, he can collect money, give money, and give receipt on the move. How are you going about your partner initiatives? Our biggest partner in all our initiatives is the government. Today the PCs and the Laptops are moving away from just being gadgets of the elite to being useful devices of the common man. The government has shown tremendous interest is ensuring that the policies are helping people across levels. The second part of partnership involves OEMs and some of our deepest association is with HP, Lenovo, Dell, HCL and others. The third level of partnership is with the distributors who take our products into the market. The fourth piece is the application developers and the fifth, NGOs. With this intricate mesh of multilevel partnerships, we have been and continue to drive our presence in the Indian market.