Congress is drawn to MS displays

Technology adoption seems to be seeping down to the grassroots. With “India living in the villages”, political parties are working to ensure that they optimise the use of technology to reach out to their traditional vote bank — the rural masses.

The technologies develo-ped by global IT giant Micro-soft has attracted the atten-tion of the ruling Congress Party which is planning to use this to interact with the illiterate and semi-literate villagers across the country from its party headquarters in New Delhi.

Microsoft’s display technologies enable projection onto any surface inclu-ding walls, tabletops and windows. The US-headquartered company has already come out with a proof-of-concept with regard to these technologies.

“The Congress Party is looking at ways to use these kinds of displays to reach out to the rural, semi-literate or illiterate environment. They are very inter-ested in grassroot engag-ements to get the illiterate and semi-literate villag-ers to interact with the par-ty headquarters in Delhi,”

Microsoft Corporation (India) Chairman Ravi Venkatesan said. Speaking at the sixth India innovation summit, organi-sed by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) here on Thursday, Venkatesan said, he had one of the most interesting and practical conversation around display technologies, with the Congress Party.

“With such a techno-logy (which does not need servers but requires came-ras), any surface can be made into a display.... You can project it on to a wall... use the wall itself... table tops...,” the Microsoft India chair-man said, adding that he was expecting the display technology to be ubiquitous in the next five years.