CLOUD COMPUTING - A HOPE FOR THE RURAL INDIA

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1 CLOUD COMPUTING - A HOPE FOR THE RURAL INDIA Shaily malik Lecturer, CSE Dept. Maharaja Surajmal Instt. Of Technology Janakpuri, New Delhi Vineet Sinha 3 rd year Student, CSE Dept. Maharaja Surajmal Instt. Of Technology Janakpuri, New Delhi ABSTRACT Rural population being the majority of Indian population has the potential of making India an economic superpower and a developed country but in the present scenario this majority is completely oblivious to the power and capability of Information technology in improvement of business opportunities and employment because of the huge costs incurred on infrastructure, software etc. This paper discusses how the 'cloud computing' paradigm can help the rural population in overcoming these hurdles and which will ultimately lead to rural area development and an overall economic progress of the nation. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Systems and Software-Distributed Systems; C.2 [Computer Communication Networks] : Distributed Systems Network Operating Systems. General Terms Theory Keywords Cloud computing, rural development. 1. INTRODUCTION India s 72.2 % of population resides in the rural areas and villages[4]. India s huge population has a great potential to make it an economic as well as an IT superpower but the major hindrance is the lack of infrastructure for the development of the technical know-how amongst the people living in the rural areas and the villages. With the introduction of the new cloud computing paradigm these problems can be easily eliminated because it doesn t require the end users to have any type of infrastructure, as all of them are delivered as services (whether it be infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS), Software as a service (SaaS) ) on a pay per-cycle basis (utility computing) virtually which makes it easier/cheaper for the people living in rural areas to actively involve themselves in the IT sector. 1.1 The current scenario Some of the reasons why the IT development and usage in the rural areas is stagnant have been listed below. 12

2 Some of the other advantages of cloud computing are : 2.1 lower computer costs : there is no need of powerful computers as all the storage and processing is done in the cloud 2.2 reduces software costs : instead of buying expensive licenses for applications the user can pay for the software on a pay per cycle basis. 2.3 unlimited storage : there wont be a need to buy storage devices as all the storage will be done in the cloud. Figure 1. Current Scenario 2. WHAT IS CLOUD COMPUTING? Cloud computing provides a platform to use the shared computing resources[4]. It groups large number of computing servers and other resources and typically offers their combined capacity on an on- demand, pay per cycle basis. Cloud Computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the datacenters that provide those services. End users can access the service anytime, anywhere, share data and collaborate more easily, and keep their data stored safely in the infrastructure. When a Cloud is made available in a pay-as-you-go manner to the public, we call it a Public Cloud; the service being sold is Utility Computing[5]. If a user interacts with any online application, , online social networking, online slide show creation, online design tools, online mind mapping and file conversion, collaborative software, social media, online data storage or any other internet-based application, actually user interacts with Cloud Computing environment[5]. Some applications are easy to use and others are waiting to get in touch with cloud computing. 3. HOW CAN IT HELP? This paper focuses on some of the most core elements of rural development on which the usage of cloud computing paradigm is going to have a great impact i.e. business and education. 3.1 Business There are a number of very small scale industries mushrooming in the rural parts of India but none of them have the ability to match global standards of business and these industries don t have a chance of withstanding the incoming globalization in India until they start making efforts to meet international standards. One of the greatest issue which hinders the economic development of these very small scale industries is : Involvement of middlemen : Since the people living in rural areas are unable to sell their own production (specially in the agriculture and the handicraft industry) in the market, many middlemen pop up in between the retail and the production which ultimately leads to poor rural development. The involvement of the middlemen can be eliminated if the producers involve themselves in e-commerce and sell their produced items directly to the end users/retailers which is very much possible due to the efficient business management with the use of cloud computing as shown in the image below. 13

3 development packages or working platforms Don t need to setup huge and expensive infrastructure (such as high speed processing computers or huge data storage devices) when they can use these resources from the cloud providers, e.g. The latest versions of the mathematics software packages such as Mat lab and Mathematics are capable of using Cloud Computing to perform expensive evaluations which might be impossible to perform on a single system. Figure 2. Involvement of middleman 3.2 Education The major hurdle for development of IT related education in the rural areas is the lack of institutes with proper infrastructure to provide this level of education as a result of which this level of education is only available to those who can afford to come to cities to study which is a minimal percentage of the actual rural population. To be able to tap the maximum potential of the rural India it is very important that these IT study institutes be located in the rural areas itself with proper tools such as proper applications, proper infrastructure and appropriate development platforms. Till now none of this is possible in rural areas because of the huge amount of money spent on buying software licenses, setting up proper infrastructure required for computation, storage etc. But with the three fundamental units of cloud computing i.e. IaaS, PaaS and SaaS the finances required for setting up these kind of institutes can be reduced by huge percentages as these institutes : Don t need to buy expensive software licenses when they can pay for it on a payper cycle basis whether it be software 3.3 Medical Cloud computing can be used for catering initiatives like the health care and e-governance. Every citizen can have it's health record on the cloud which would facilitate to improve the quality of health care as well as in Government can provide various of it's facilities. The lack of infrastructure, manpower and services in health sector in India is mainly due to the gap in overall development between rural and urban areas.e- Health offers a good option wherein patients in remote areas can be successfully managed locally with advice from specialists in metro cities, without going there personally. This allows connecting patients in rural areas to urban services without disconnecting urban service providers from their environment. This offers easier, cost effective consultation, prescription mechanism[7] Applications of Cloud Computing in medical: 1. National Doctors' Registration Database location of doctors can be identified. With shortage of medical resources in the country, it may be useful to have medical expertise of good doctors wherever needed through 14

4 2. Storage of Images 3. Pharmaceutical Analysis 4. Biosurveillance 5. Insurance Claims Loss Control tele-medicine. Interoperability will lessen the overall costs as duplicate orders can be significantly identified and reduced. Mostly in Government hospitals where referrals would be common, diagnostics can be completely filmless. Using hundreds of high speed servers in the cloud the analysis will take quite less time. Online outburst of communicable diseases would be possible and even for other diseases it would be easier to launch health programs for specific areas. Systems for detecting frauds, improper or duplicate claims. These are the few aspects many more are queued up for the forthcoming scenario. 4. EDUCATION FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND VICE VERSA The cloud computing environment will lead to better skilled people in rural areas and villages. These technocrats from the rural areas will involve themselves in the IT sector to empower the technology development. Hence, the maximum potential of the rural India can be utilized. The spread of rural technologies will be facilitated if they also are employment generators. This scenario will surely lead to the increase in the standard of living of the rural people and convert a simple and poor economy into modern and high-income economy. Economic development is the social and technological progress of any nation. Cloud computing may give an extensive growth to the Economy of rural areas by providing IT opportunities to the people which will lead to efficient business management. The income from the business will provide better funds for the development of technical institutes in the rural areas which will result into more number of technical people. RURAL DEVELOPMENT Better Skilled people in rural areas and villages Provide better funds For Institutes Leads to Efficient business management and IT opportunities Figure 3. Rural Development 5. FUTURE BUSSINESS OPPORTUNITIES Introduction of IT in the rural areas due to cloud computing will lead to an enhanced exposure on the rural crowd and will lead to certain business opportunities which are currently non-existent there. Some of them have been discussed below : 5.1 BPOs : the business process outsourcing sector is a huge employment provider in India but the employment provided is limited to big towns and cities. By the increased influence and exposure of IT in these areas there can be a huge opportunity to use this IT educated crowd as a massive human resource. 15

5 5.2 KPOs : Similarly introduction of IT based education in these areas will lead to growth of expertise in these areas and hence there is scope for establishment of knowledge process outsourcing. 6. BENEFIT FOR THE SOFTWARE PROVIDERS The introduction of IT in rural areas will not only benefit the people there but also the software providers due to the following reasons : 6.1 Reduced piracy : the current software piracy rate in India is 68% because the software licenses are very expensive and are absolutely unaffordable for someone who lives in these areas[5]. Reduced software prices due to cloud computing will hence lead to a reduction in piracy and will be beneficial for the software providers. 6.2 Skilled labor : the increase of IT experts in these areas will add to the IT skilled labor crowd which will ultimately provide the software providers with a better labor force. Can Do for Cloud Computing. Proceedings of 18th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructures for Collaborative Enterprises,2009,pp [3] Demers, A. J., Petersen, K., Spitzer, M. J., Terry, D. B., Theimer, M. M., and Welch, B. B. The bayou architecture: Support for data sharing among mobile users. In Proceedings IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems & Applications (Santa Cruz, California, August-September 1994), pp [4] India census data 2001, available at [5] Piracy rates in India, available at [6] Indrajit Bhattacharya, Reformation of Healthcare Services through Workforce Development in Healthcare IT, available at ehealthonline.org CONCLUSION The conclusion drawn from this study was that the use of cloud computing paradigm will be of great help in the development of rural India. Not only will it lead to better IT education in these areas but also in huge business opportunities and better medical facilities. REFERENCES 1] R. Buyya, Rajiv Ranjan, and Rodrigo N. Calheiros. Modeling and Simulation of Scalable Cloud Computing Environments And the CloudSim Toolkit: Challenges and Opportunities. Proceedings of the 7th High Performance Computing and Simulation (HPCS 2009) Conference, Leipzig, Germany,June 21-24, [2] Börje Ohlman, Anders Eriksson and René Rembarz. What Networking of Information 16