Aravind Sitaraman is the president for inclusive growth with Cisco, where he aims to provide inclusive growth by providing education, health and skill development in India through out-of-the-box technology solutions. The company has partnered with various state governments as technology and service providers for their tele-education and tele-health initiatives. In conversation with Shivangi Narayan, Sitaraman talks about Cisco’s present projects in health and education, challenges and future plans of the company to provide health and education to every corner of the country. Excerpts:

What are some of the specific programmes in tele-health and tele-education taken up by Cisco? How many people/regions have they covered so far?
Our pilot programmes for healthcare have been implemented in Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh; education programmes in Karnataka (CEED) and skill development programmes in Karnataka and Kerala. We are also planning to start a training centre for nurses in Bihar. We teach 1,000 students through our CEED programme in Raichur in Karnataka and around 3,000 students in Hoskote and Shimoga. 

The Cisco health presence platform delivers specialty and super-specialty consultations to people in remote areas. It provides paediatric consultation in Chinchwara, which is one of the remotest villages in Madhya Pradesh. There was a child in Raichur who was diagnosed with heart problems with the help of our telemedicine programme. He was able to get treated in a timely manner in Raichur because there was a telemedicine centre there.

What are Cisco’s plans to achieve inclusion in education and health?
We are delivering teachers to students via technology. Here the teacher will be able to take the instruction one step higher and use multimedia and other tools to provide quality education to the students. In healthcare, too, we will be able to provide remote consultations to people in the villages and help them cure themselves without having to travel out of their villages.

Tell us more about Cisco education-enabled development (CEED)?
CEED is a platform that helps teachers connect to remote villages via a cloud network and helps them interact in a meaningful manner. We tied up with the Samudaya programme in Karnataka in 2011, (as part of which) we are providing education to close to 1,000 children in government schools at the primary level in English, math, science and social studies. This was part of our corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative in Karnataka. However, as we are not a CSR body but a for-profit one, we started the inclusive growth wing for Cisco, so that we could provide business solutions for inclusive growth and work with the government for the same.

We have started two more programmes in Hoskote and Shimoga districts of Karnataka where we provide supplementary education to children so that they can study subjects for which they do not receive adequate guidance in their schools. On the advice of the district commissioner, we provide this supplementary education in hostels for socially and financially marginalised children and reach up to 3,000 such children. We work with the government sector schools and reach out to children at the primary level. 

What is the target population for your programmes of inclusive growth?
The 750 million lower middle-class/poor people who aspire to be in the mainstream but do not have the resources. These are the people who need to be given resources. Across the world, we target 3 billion such people through our programmes.

Considering poor internet outreach in India, do you think technology in health and education can achieve their desired results?
This indeed is a constraint, so we have designed extremely simple technology which can be used by anyone from any part of the country. It just needs one touch. In future when cloud will be a part of everyday life, we will not need even that, as the cloud will manage everything and start the programme at the stipulated time of the class (in tele-education).

Apart from that, we have partnered with government, universities and NGOs to build human resources who can handle these systems and equipment. We also provide full service wherever we set up our systems.

How do you plan to create awareness for technology in India?
I believe that if you have to sell technology, you will never find buyers. Technology has to be hidden and services in the forefront if the industry needs to make people adapt new systems. Similarly the government has to see that the technology works, that people find it useful and also that it is affordable to people. Once such technology is available, people will automatically take (to) it and there will be no need to create awareness, just as it is in the case of mobile phones today.

What are the loopholes at policy level that you think hamper better health and education in India?
In our case, the government has been very cooperative and has helped us in every way to implement our programmes. Today we need to develop human capital on the ground for management of infrastructure and spend money for legitimate expenses to maintain the infrastructure. Managing and using this infrastructure will enable and empower our population to move forward and become a part of the progress of the nation.

Do you plan to utilise the e governance infrastructure to push tele-education and tele-health?
India’s best kept secret is that there is enough fibre laid down in this country for technology initiatives. We have found fibre or some sort of symmetrical bandwidth wherever we have gone, so setting up connectivity in India is not a big problem as the government has already spent a lot of money in setting up fibre (apart from e-governance infrastructure), which can be utilised for our programmes. We are at the cusp of making tremendous change in India with regard to inclusive growth and we make the right moves then India will be completely changed in the coming four to five years. We will be able to provide specialty healthcare, skill development and education to the gram panchayat level in India.