Having been adjudged as the winner in the ‘Equal Rating Innovation Challenge’ organised by Mozilla, IIT Bombay’s project ‘Gram Marg Solution for Rural Broadband’ will receive USD 125,000 (INR 82 lakh) from the global non—profit organisation to fund its unique affordable broadband initiative.
Gram Marg, which roughly translates as “roadmap” in Hindi, seeks to bring 640,000 villages in rural India online.
Spearheaded by Indian Institute of Technology Bombay professor Abhay Karandikar, Dean (Faculty Affairs), and Institute Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering Dr. Sarbani Banerjee Belur, a Senior Project Research Scientist, the IIT Bombay’s project reinforces the remarkable progress such communities could achieve once they have access to information pertaining to education, health and the political process.
In the competition called for initiatives to make affordable Internet available to all, the ‘Gram Marg Solution for Rural Broadband’ project won by an overwhelming margin.
In the competition, Mozilla received 100 submissions from 27 countries. The final shortlist of best five entries was prepared after deliberations by an esteemed panel of expert judges from around the world. Nearly 6,000 votes were polled in the online community voting in the final phase of the competition, with Gram Marg and Zenzeleni emerging as the leading vote-getters.
In its bid to both bridge the digital divide and empower unconnected communities, the Gram Marg team has
created an ingenious and “indigenous” technology that utilizes unused white space on the TV spectrum to backhaul data from village wifi clusters to provide broadband access (frugal 5G).
The team of academics and field workers leverages what people already have in their homes, and creates rugged receivers and transmitters to connect villages in even the most difficult terrains. The solution has been rolled out in 25 villages on a pilot basis so far. The win entitles Project Gram Marg to USD 125,000 (Rs82 lakh) in funding.
Reacting to the honour, Prof Karandikar of IIT-B said: “We are humbled by the judges' decision and the community votes that choose our solution as the winner”.
“We are also evaluating an applications and services model to enable local village populations to reap the full benefits of broadband access. We hope that our model can be aligned with our Prime Minister's vision of ‘Broadband for all’ under the government's Digital India program,” Prof Karandikar said.
Spelling out the objective behind RsEqual Rating Innovation Challenge’, Katharina Borchert, Chief Innovation Officer at Mozilla, stated: “ At Mozilla, our commitment to Equal Rating through policy, innovation, research and support of entrepreneurs in the space will continue beyond this Innovation Challenge, but it will take a global community to bring all of the internet to all people. We’re incredibly honoured that part of this global community came together and engaged with us through this Innovation Challenge. We’re excited and optimistic about the road ahead.”
The runner-up award of USD 75,000 went to Afri-Fi: Free Public WiFi, led by Tim Human from South Africa. The project is an extension of the successful project Isizwe, which offers 500MB of data for free per day.
The “Most Novel” award worth USD 30,000 went to Bruno Vianna and his team from the Free Networks P2P Cooperative, which is building on the energy of free networks movement in Brazil to tackle the digital divide.
Mozilla, the non-profit organization behind the open source browser Firefox, launched the ‘Equal Rating Innovation Challenge’ in October 2016 as part of its endeavour to help catalyze new thinking and innovation for providing open internet access to communities living without it. It called out to entrepreneurs, designers, researchers and innovators from all over the world to propose creative and scalable ideas that can cultivate digital literacy and provide affordable access to the full diversity of the open internet. Mozilla offered awards totalling USD 250,000 (INR 164 lakhs) in funding and expert mentorship to bring these solutions to the market.