India has never developed a technology solution that has truly changed the world. Very early on at the dawn of India’s tech boom we gave the world its first shareable handheld computation device. The Simputer was the coolest tech product in the world at its time and it was engineered to address some uniquely Indian problems. It was relatively cheap but was made even more affordable because it was designed to be used by not just one person but by many. But despite its promise, the Simputer never made it big.
India has the opportunity to change the world yet again in its own unique way. We have the ability to build urban mobility solutions that operate at population scale and which could transform the way we move. But in order to do that we will need to fundamentally change the way we think about commuting.
The Simputer.
Additional reading:
To learn more about the Simputer project visit its website at www.simputer.org. The New York Times article on the Simputer can be accessed from the NYT Archives at this link.
To learn more how battery swapping works watch this video about how battery swapping works in e-rickshaws told from the perspective of the driver. And don’t miss this truly impressive video that demonstrates how you can swap out the batteries of a bus in under 3 minutes.
Thanks to Chetan Maini, Professor Vijay Chandru and Dr Ashwin Mahesh. Photo of the Simputer by Frederick "FN" Noronha on Flickr, CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0. 2006.