All Aboard India's Technicolour Dream Train Click

Putin in Moscow and said he was not trying to influence events. And now

one BBC News, Click. Driving in India is an experience.

singing... Sort of. Driving in India is an experience.

The roads are crammed and the horn is on the present and the rules

are... Well, they are there somewhere, I'm sure. And that's why

we will not be doing a story about self driving cars in India any time

soon. And despite the fact that it seems like everybody here owns a

car, that is not true. Any people choose to travel by train instead.

If you think that is any less intense... Think again. Yeah, about

those rules... The central station is a massive heaving hub collecting

the city to the north and east of India. If you look closely, you will

see something else connecting the commuters to the rest of the world.

116 wireless access points provide free Wi-Fi to anybody with an Indian

phone number. It is provided by Google which says that about 2.5 TB

are being downloaded here every day. And here is the interesting part,

this is not just about this station. Along the railway tracks live 45,000

kilometres of optical fibre and Google is piping Internet access

down those cables to feed Wi-Fi access to 114 other train stations

as well. The man overseeing the project is this man, who I caught up

with while he was waiting for a train. If you had to take one place

in the country where you wanted tremendous fibre and you had to have

reliable power then, relatively speaking, power is a challenge and

the entire country had to walk for, there is only one place. That is

awry waystation. Can you guarantee that all services on Google's Wi-Fi

will be treated equally? Absolutely. I think the whole motivation for us,

if you look at the reason why we do this was to see if we could provide

an open Internet, completely open with access to the entire world. The

way the web was designed. So, there is a fibre network rolling out from

train stations like this to the vast rural areas of this enormous

country. And David hopped on a train to find out what effect that has

happened having elsewhere in India. It is hard not to be romantic about

the railways of India. British colonial rulers laid tracks to

control shifting resources, mostly out, and prising open markets. Now

it is about moving people, millions a day. And thanks to optic fibre,

data. I took the train to a station to investigate. It has proper

broadband and it is free. People are filling their booths. Apart from

some controversy, at this station where people were using free Wi-Fi

to download hard-core pornography, the provision of high-speed Wi-Fi

has been almost universally praised. 90,000 people pass through the

station every day. I use the Internet for work and entertainment.

For a student journalist it means she can keep tabs on breaking

stories. Early in the morning, the world changes like... So many things

change. I come and check. Indian stations are full of thriving

businesses, feeding off or simply feeding the thousands streaming

through them every day. Free Wi-Fi has been a boon to local businesses

here. This man runs a tea stall on the platform. He makes more money

now that his customers and make online payments to him. I use the

Wi-Fi when my four G signal does not catch. When that does not work, I

use Wi-Fi, especially when a customer pays digitally. I needed to

confirm I have received the payment. A digital payment worth about 30% of

my takings. This is music to the years of people managing the

railways of India. An industry that runs at a loss. They think that

high-speed Wi-Fi could be a good pool frustration might Jaipur. They

planned to build a huge concourse and attract retail and services

business. As Wi-Fi expands and it becomes taken for granted then I

think people will transfer more and more of their business. Jaipur is a

tourist hub of high repute. People come out here from all parts of the

world. And when you have a huge concourse it is an area where you

can have shops and entertainment. For Google, more people online as

more people to sell to. India's railway is the country's backbone.

Its public Wi-Fi is poised to be at least as far reaching.

Go and welcome to the week in Tech. It was the week that laptops and

other electronic devices larger than cellphones were banned from caverns

on US and UK bound flights, leaving from some African and Middle Eastern

countries. They start up hopes to be able to provide flights from London

to Paris by electric plane within ten years and faster than Concorde,

supersonic travel between London and New York could be back with flight

times of just three hours and 15 minutes. After the start-up, Boom

Supersonic gained $33 million in funding. An unarmed starved

convenience store has opened in Shanghai. Created by a Swedish

company, the always open never staffed by a human shop requires

using an app to enter, scam purchases and pay. Nasser is

creating an origami inspired robot that can flatten itself to fit into

small spaces. The robot can cope with extremely high temperatures

and, finally, if you could do anything in virtual reality, what

would it be? Well... If your answer was to play a game of catch with an

actual ball then you are in luck. Research have been examining how the

ball's path can be tracked, predicted and matched up in its

virtual view. Or... You could just play without the heads sect. --

headset. You may have noticed by now that the roads here are in India

are... Well... Utterly chaotic. What is ever more astonishing, consider

that so few people own a car here. There are just 32 motor vehicles per

1000 people in India. In the United States, there are 797. But that

number is changing and I'll tell you a secret, it is not going down. Look

at these roads. That is a scary thought. One solution could be to

make better use of the cars that are already on the road. Enter all cabs,

the biggest taxi reeling app, the Uber of India as you will. Or as

they say, Uber is the all of India. Founded back in 2010, three years

before Uber launched in India, they have taken full advantage of their

head start. They have historically been number one in India but the

Uber has said that that is changing. It looks like the battle for the Pat

Cash in India is only just beginning. These are the head

offices in silicon Valley of India, Bangalore. This is employee number

one. India is not designed to have many cars. What are the specific

needs of your customers and drivers? We made a platform that is not just

about cabs but about many other things in India. Supporting bikes,

electricity,... Different transport options. So that brings an a lot of

options for users. They say that it is better because it is local and it

knows what works in India. They offer things like walk-in centres

for drivers and being the first to allow drivers to pay by cash. Do

brew is coming into the Indian market. How are you different from

them? How will you stay ahead? There is a fundamental difference in the

way we operate. We believe in what we want and not what we have. Uber

plugging in things have worked well elsewhere. It is about the

connection that you make, not just about the transaction. Part of that

connection is offering centres like this. Here, drivers can talk

face-to-face with the company, for example Clark, like when they join

the service for training or if they have a problem, an issue with their

wages, for example. But they do not actually employee any of these

people. They call everybody here a partner. In reality, they are

self-employed. That means they do not get things like holiday pay and

they are responsible for maintaining their car and paying for fuel. The

flipside is that drivers can, in theory, set their own schedule and

work when they please. It is a controversial system that transport

and delivery companies around the world have used to keep costs down.

Despite this, all really, really wants drivers to drive. A lock. So

much so that there are carrots if you stay on the road and sticks if

you don't. What India really needs to focus on is to enable mobility

for a billion people. We need to leapfrog all sorts of impediments

and we need to promote share mobility, sustainable options, our

government is focusing in a big way on all vehicles. Ola is one of the

most successful start-ups to come out of the education sector. These

top-level universities are dotted across India and they are the

driving force behind many of India's technology successes. Getting into

IIT is a competitive business. Only a tiny fraction of applicants get in

in any year. But if you do, you get to work in incredible campuses like

this. My first appointment is at the

Olympic-sized swimming pool. Although it's not me who's taking a

dip... This is Matsia, named after the avatar of Vishnu, which takes

the form of a fish, it's a multipurpose underwater robot that

can operate autonomously, without a human controller, to make sounds,

and recognise, manipulate and grab objects. The team tell me it might

be used to find flight recorders from aircraft, although they're also

pitching it to the military to fire torpedoes. The project is in its

fifth year, and the team leader here tells me the work is hard,

We are giving everything you want... Like a race carg, or a satellite.

Brilliant! Is Matsia is one of 100 projects that have been supported by

IIT Bombay's society for innovation and entrepreneurship since 2004.

It's an umbrella for start-ups and, as with incubators everywhere,

you'll find all kinds of ideas bubbling away behind its doors. As

you might expect, there are aerial ideas, there are medical ideas, but

there are also musical ideas - which is why you find me making strange

noises with my face... Doooo-deeeee-ddoooooo. Very good.

There you go. You got some score over there. "Some score." If you do

better, your score will increase. Yeah, the worst karaoke India has

ever heard. But then, this singing training app is so much more than

normal karaoke-style games... Most karaoke apps do a very cursory kind

of evaluation of your singing. Some don't evaluate your singing, they

just have input - you open your mouth, you get a good rating. We do

a multidimensional evaluation of your singing on different aspects of

music - pitch, rhythm, dynamics, timing...

You asked for a hard exercise! Ehhhh-oooooh...

Eeeeeh-eeeeee-eeeeehhh... ECHOING

If my singing went right through you, I've got something upstairs

that will really cut to the bone. The Algo Surge team are working on a

system for surgeons to plan surgery. They've created software that's

learned to create a three-D model of bones from just two two-dimensional

X-rays. I can imagine, after a lot of experience, a bone - if I just

look at an X-ray, I can imagine it in three-D - can we do the same

thing with computers? A virgin can do it, because he has learned a lot

of correlation between X-ray data and the bone he sees in the surgery.

We use the same logic to develop the software. We have a machine-learned

algorithm which has learned the three-D of bones across the

population. We have created a lot of models from CT scan, and we use this

as a kind of database, and we create an algorithm to understand that

database in a particular array to predict X-ray images. These three-D

models also allow for tools and guides to be designed to the

patient's specific dimensions. For example, if a surgeon was preparing

to cut and realign legs. We have special, specific instrumentation

which uses the bone surface in three-D, and it is like a negative

of the three-D bone surface. If you make that part and print it in

three-D, and put it on the real bone, it will exactly fit. So what

we do is, we use that concept to cut, to make surgeon cut more

rapidly, so this part will be exact fit on the bone, but it will also

have a slit which will be aligned with the cutting plate. That slit

can be used during the surgery to guide cutting tool. Two X-rays are,

of course, cheaper than a full three-D CT or MRI scan and, once

again, it means patients can be assessed who can't get to a fully

kitted hospital. There's no surprise that many of the projects here

concentrate on low-cost, rugged solutions to developing world

problems. You may have come across Braille displays before, which allow

you to connect via Bluetooth to your Android tablet, then whichever menu

item is highlighted on the screen, the text is mirrors on the Braille

readt here, and you can control the navigation using up and down buttons

here. Well, this is a prototype Braille display called Braille Me,

which works in a slightly different way. The Braille displays currently

existing on the market are based on keiso-electric technology. Because

of that, the cost for these devices are around are $2,000 to deloo 3,000

each. We developed a completely new technology based on magnetics that

are able to reduce the cost by 10 times. So we can sell it to the user

at a price point around $300-$400. This machine needs to move for at

least 10 million cycles of movement, it needs to be quiet, have power,

and needs to be very precise. That is the challenge. This is the

Andumen Irdu Primary School in Calcutta. There are 155 kids here

from Grade 1 through to 7, and a whole bunch of dedicated teachers.

And this is how they start their day.

Over in Virjaya Nijak's classroom, things are a little more serious...

So, at the back of the projector, there's a device which is plugged in

and is running videos on English, maths and science. The videos are

made for the entire region. But then they're dubbed in different

dialects, different languages, depending on where they're sent to.

Today, we're learning about fractions.

It is great teaching tool - as long as there is electricity... But there

are plenty of times when there isn't.

Transthis is a valued school. Earlier, it would be difficult to

teach because of power cuts. As the day passed by in the afternoon, we

would have power cuts for more than two hours. That's why the projector

and tablet are hooked up to this box, which is itself attached to a

solar panel on the roof. Together, they can provide up to five hours of

electricity a day, meaning that classes don't have to be interrupted

or cancelled if the power cuts out. Then, we started using solar power,

as it is an easy and natural source of generating electricity. We have

introduced a studiy of generating power through solar energy to our

students, and are teaching them the importance and working of it. We

also explain to our students that this process will help us in the

future to generate electricity. This whole system has been provided by

the Selco Foundation, an Indian charity with the aim of hoping to

alleviate poverty by improving access to energy. With this, they

will get a better education through audiovisual teaching, and there is

no problem of electricity. So time teachers can take their students to

the classroom, they can teach through this medium. Selco and other

NGOs they work with pay for half of the cost of installing the projector

and solar system - the other half comes from local schools or local

governments. How important is the projector?

TRANSLATION: Before this project came in to use it, we had very few

students. But since, we have started using the solar power, our number of

students has increased in a good way. We have students coming to us

from different villages to learn, and not only students - we have

other schools coming down to our institute for smart classes. The

smart class is a good way of teaching kids these days. They seem

to enjoy and learn more than usual. After we introduced part? Class, our

school stands proudly in the educational sector. We plan to grow

larger as the years pass by. Cool. Whoa!

The same system is already in hundreds of rural schools, and

they're aiming to add hundreds more this year.

And it's not just key for schools - across rural India, businesses can

be helped massively by having a reliable power supply. Somana is a

seamstress who lives a short drive from Kindapur. She became the

breadwinner for her family after her father was taken ill. The more

clothing she can prepare, the more she gets paid. With her old method,

she could fix a couple of items per day. But thanks to the solar panel

on her roof, she can whiz through five or sext per day. Plus, she has

a fan, a TV and a light, so she can work earlier and later.

One-quarter of India's rural population lives below the official

population line - that's 260 million people whose livelihoods could be

improved by the addition of basic facilities like electricity. And of

course, one key way of helping people out of poverty is...

..education. It's always such a privilege to come to a place like

this and see how the simplest technology can make a world of

difference. That's it from India for the moment. You can see plenty of

photos and more backstage gossip on Twitter. We live at:

Thanks for watching. See you soon. There will be some chilly

nights this weekend.