One way to find out how technologies will impact the social space in times to come is to keep an eye on Satish Jha. He has been there way ahead of most and done that. He co-founded Tarahaat.com with Ashok Khosla and it inspired several other similar initiatives initiatives to take ICTs to the villages of India. Tarahaat was honored with Stockholm Challenge Award and several organizations invested in it by way of grants as well as equity. It was followed by co-founding Baramati Conference along with Sharad Pawar and Motoo Kusakabe of The World Bank. Baramati has since become a place to visit for most people looking for ideas to explore how technologies can help village India. Baramti was made a WiFi enabled urban area with the help of Media Lab Asia and later WiMaxed courtesy Craig Barrett of Intel. Satish then co-founded Digital Partners India that created the social entrepreneurship movement in technology and social space. Initially starting with an award for 10 best projects globally that leveraged ICTs to empower the poor while quickly becoming commercially viable, sustainable, replicable and scalable, he initiated mentoring programs for emerging social entrepreneurs. 

He supported Drishtee with personal resources when it was headed for rough times and took the lead in Digital Partners championing its cause and investing about $250,000 and helped create a structure that mentored its management. Now Drishtee has emerged as a strong model of how tele-centers can be used in villages. Incidentally, there have been a number of studies comparing Tarahaat.com and Drishtee models and these represent two ends of the spectrum outlining how information technologies can help rural India.

It was in 2002 when he may have created virtually the first web-based video conferencing between two villages of Rajasthan that did not have telephones but had access to cable TV. Using the cable TV infrastructure Satish thought of the idea of helping villagers videoconference using the web. It was recorded in real time by a Japanese TV team that had accompanied him to study some of his initiatives in ICTs for Development.

He has been supporting eHealthCare since it entered the social entrepreneurship competition and eHealthCare is perhaps the first web based patient care information management system combined with a hospital and physicians practice management system that can bring down the average per patient record keeping cost for a hospital to under $2 per annum. Compared to a $2 per page cost in the US system it can be big cost saver for all hospitals and physicians. It has been tried in six states in public hospitals.

As an invited member to the boards of what has come to be known as RHIO (Regional Health Information Office) that connects various health care provider institutions to create a personal health record for all healthcare customers, that is all the US residents, he learnt that the ideas of eHealthcare were way ahead of its emergence in the US system.

As a co-chair of WITFOR 2005 and 2007 he has been exploring avenues for economic opportunities with information and communication technologies in other developing countries as well. 

He believes that by throwing the idea of $100 laptop Nicholas Negroponte of MIT's Media Lab energized the ICT for Development market. He practically challenged the community of technologists to think of lowering the computing costs by an order of magnitude and design targeted PCs in volume. Satish Jha believes that in the next three to five years the cost of computing in the `developing countries will come down by a factor of ten. 

Chetna Mishra, CT, USA