Native villages of 2 Nobel laureates to go digital on World Wi-Fi Day

Purasakkudi and Mangudi, home to Sir CV Raman and Dr S Chandrasekhar, will see Wi-fi connectivity

Two villages, which are native of two Nobel laureates from Tamil Nadu, will go digital on World Wi-Fi Day (June 20). Internet & Wi-Fi service provider Microsense is networking the ancestral villages of Sir C V Raman and Dr. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

Purasakkudi and Mangudi (also known as Agaramangudi) are barely 20 kms away from the temple town of Thanjavur.

Microsense's Managing Director, S Kailasanathan, an IIT Madras and IIM-Calcutta passout, will connect these villages to the world.

"The project has been a labour of love for Kailasanathan, an ardent fan of the work of Sir C.V. Raman whose findings on the scattering of light is an important tool for analyzing the composition of liquids, gases and solids," said the company.

For Kailasanathan, it made sense to network these two Tamil Nadu hamlets ahead of 2,50,000 other villages waiting to get connected under government plan given the fact that they had produced such eminent physicists. 

Sir C.V. Raman's family had agricultural land here and even today although the family has moved to cities, his ancestral home is intact here.

Microsense is setting up communications solutions to network the villages.

To begin with, Microsense will be setting up Wi-Fi hotspots for Internet access at a few locations in the village that includes the Panchayat Office and residential localities using Microsense's Cloud Wi-Fi platform.

Challenges include provisioning power, drawing in the last miles from far off locations, besides deploying the Wi-Fi gears. Physical security and safety of this equipment including real time maintenance is also a challenge that Microsense engineers are getting ready to wade through, says Sujit Singh, CEO, Microsense.

Most of the 1,000 families in these two villages own simple smartphones and when Wi-Fi hot zones go live, Microsense Director Rajiv Talwar hopes they will all be able to access Internet.

Initially it will useful for children of the villages who can use the Internet as an educational tool. To start them off on their learning journey, Microsense will donate two laptop computers to the Mangudi government aided village school (up to Class 6) and a desktop as a common resource for use by the villagers (also to be located in the village school.)