The role of the Media Lab Asia is to facilitate the invention, refinement, and dissemination of innovations that benefit the masses. The Media Lab Asia is working with industry, NGOs, and the government to bring these innovations to every village in India. An ambitious 10-year plan for meeting the grand challenges in learning, health, and enterprise, the key to the success of the Media Lab Asia will be combining the creativity of Indian entrepreneurs with the technical know-how of universities to grow sustainable, and culturally appropriate solutions. Particular challenges include the need to operate in many different languages and the need to support local culture and tradition.

    The Media Lab Asia will begin with a few regional laboratories and participating villages and later add additional regional laboratories and villages. The Media Lab Asia will grow from proposals coming from villages, universities, NGOs and industry. In addition to the regional laboratories, there is an operational office (headquarters office) in Mumbai and a research programme office within the MIT Media Laboratory. The Operational Office will coordinate logistics across the country, interface with senior contacts in the government, industry, and non-governmental organizations, and suggest national-scale resources (e.g.,satellite transponder and broadcast television time).

    Each regional laboratory will be formed around a few core projects. These projects will help define the academic, industrial, and village partners. The Media Lab Asia will help build the infrastructure (communications, policy, education, industrial, intellectual etc.) needed to make these projects successful and to attract similar new projects. Regional laboratories will be located very near or at the existing educational infrastructure institutions that can provide intellectual leadership and will have world-class research facilities. They will include participants from many of the regional educational institutions and from regional NGOs, and will be a place where all these participants can meet and work together. Regional laboratories will be networked together by high-bandwidth connections that allow easy teleconferencing and data sharing.

    In addition, there will be a national media campaign, identification of policy change requirements and similar supporting changes to the village infrastructure. The mass awareness program will have the goal of making the masses aware of the potential of IT innovation to improve their lives. New forms of TV soap operas could explore ways to educate, excite, and enliven Indian communities on the role of technologies in human development.

    MIT Media Lab USA will help create a distributed research programme based in India that is focused on technology innovation in the aid of development and whose participants are drawn from undeserved communities, industry, NGOs and universities. Through participation in selected projects, the Media Lab at MIT USA would help develop frameworks by which national, regional, and village level participants can perform effective collaborative research. The Media Lab Asia research programme interface to the MIT USA campus would evolve from bringing in senior collaborators and selected graduate students for joint exploratory work for establishing one of the Media Lab Asia research branches at MIT USA, in order to manage the exchange of people, projects, and financial support between the institutions, as well as provide a focus for fundamental research activities.

    The research programme envisioned for Media Lab Asia will be rooted in a handful of basic tenets. These include-recognising children as the country’s most precious natural resource and with the aid of new technologies can serve as an army of teachers. Technology-enabled innovations will only flourish if they are part of the daily lives of all people, at all levels, including entertainment and leisure. Being rural can mean being rich and inventive telecommunications can stem the tide of urbanization and the growth of slums.

    Each regional laboratory will serve as a focus for technical innovation and serve as a research laboratory for sponsoring organizations. It is anticipated that the result will be a network of research centers sponsored by organizations interested in IT for the masses. The motivation for philanthropic organizations will be to spend their funds as wisely as possible. The motivation for industry will be to develop new products that serve the needs of the masses. As with the MIT Media Lab’s sponsors, sponsors will view funds spent on research at the Media Lab Asia as insurance that their total investment programme will be as effective as possible.

    The Media Lab Asia’s projects are animated by four ideas- Bits for All, Tomorrow’s Tools, the World computer and the Digital Village.

    Bits for All deals with bringing digitally enabled services to everyone on earth. From synthetic aperture satellite links constructed from dozens of cell phones to bicycle computers delivering bits to the door of people’s homes. Cost-effective methods of connecting every person on earth are being explored.

    Tomorrow’s Tools are intended for translating the vision of fine-grain and pervasive computing to rural communities. Wealthy urban societies envision a world of pervasive digital intelligence but the same technologies can have even more impact in rural societies by transforming traditional handicrafts, agriculture and healthcare.

    World Computer is a computer for the illiterate, for communities, for everyone. Language, electrical power, literacy, and personal wealth are some of the problems that prevent participation in the digital revolution. Computers that transcend these barriers to bring digital services to everyone are being created.

    Digital Village is a way of realizing Gandhiji’s vision of a sustainable village through culturally appropriate use of new technologies. The goal is to create a sustainable digital ecology that maintains traditional values and community while opening economic and expressive opportunities.

    These ideas are playing out in two ways- through national-scale projects that have the potential to spread virally and be everywhere and through research hubs that are generating and vetting new concepts. In addition to the four hubs that have been developed, relationships are developing with several more potential hub partners.