Millee – Rural India Project that uses

Mobile Gaming for Learning

Millee is an inspiring project that uses mobile gaming technology to enhance access to literacy
among children of school-going age in the developing world.

The problem statement is very simple – most of the kids in rural India do not have access to a decent
level of education; to top that, most of these kids end up working in the farm during the day time
(do families understand the importance of formal education?). And ofcourse, the english speaking
teachers do not know english well enough to teach the same to kids.

. Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies is a project started by Dr.
Matthew Kam from UC Berkley.

The foundational games that we built have gone through numerous iterations since 2006, through
formative evaluations with four communities of rural and urban slums learners in both North and
South India. By field-testing with multiple communities, we observed user behaviors with the
technology that generalize across settings. Through ethnographic studies, we also studied how social
factors such as gender and caste affected MILLEE gameplay in everyday rural environments.

millee - Mobile Gaming for Rural India

Currently, the games work only with few phone models (Motorola Razr V3m) and the team has
received 450 cellphones from Nokia in order to reach out to rural children.

We followed a human-centered design process, in which we consulted experienced local English

teachers on our instructional and game designs. The foundational games that we built have gone
through numerous iterations since 2006, through formative evaluations with four communities of
rural and urban slums learners in both North and South India. By field-testing with multiple
communities, we observed user behaviors with the technology that generalize across settings.
Through ethnographic studies, we also studied how social factors such as gender and caste affected
MILLEE gameplay in everyday rural environments.

The project is far from being the ideal gaming platform for learning, it’s more about customizing the
educational platform to local language (and execution); and most importantly uses the ‘third screen’
to reach out to wider mass.
CHUTUKOOL
ChotuKool, the mini refrigerator made for rural India doesn’t have a compressor. It actually
opens from top, runs on batteries and is being test marketed in Maharashtra.

The refrigerator weighs only 7.8 kg, runs on a cooling chip and a fan similar to those used to cool
computers.

What about power consumption, one of the significant barriers? As per Godrej, Chotukool
consumes half the power consumed by regular refrigerators and uses high-end insulation to
stay cool for hours without power (via).

The winning piece is ofcourse the cheap price, i.e. Rs 3,250/, and whats important is the
engineering excellence – only 20 parts, as opposed to more than 200 parts in a normal
refrigerator.

The product has gone through multiple iteration (and like any good product, has been iterated
using customer feedback from rural women) and is distributed via micro finance groups.
Is this the world’s cheapest refrigerator? Launched by Indian conglomerate Godrej and
Boyce, ChotuKool's $69 price tag is not the only reason it can be called super economical.
The portable, top-opening unit weighs only 7.8kg, uses high-end insulation to stay cool for
hours without power and consumes half the energy used by regular refrigerators. This is a
product that has crossed several technological barriers and is designed to cross several social
barriers as well.

To achieve its efficiency the ChotuKool doesn't use a compressor, instead running on a
cooling chip and a fan similar to those used in computers, so like computers it can run on
batteries. It's engineering credentials are further boosted by the fact that it has only 20 parts,
as opposed to more than 200 parts in a normal refrigerator.

The ChotuKool was co-designed with village women to assure its acceptability, and is
distributed by members of a micro-finance group.

"It’s a reverse engineering of sorts,” says G. Sunderraman, Vice President of Corporate

Development at Godrej & Boyce.

Sunderraman says the idea to target the bottom of the pyramid customers was given shape at
a workshop with Clayton M. Christensen, the Harvard University professor, best known for
his ideas on disruptive innovation.

The idea discussed in the workshop was to involve villagers right from the design to selling
of the product. A survey by the young employees of Godrej followed, with findings showing
that rural Indians expected a refrigerator to be used to cool 5 to 6 bottles of water and stock 3
to 4 kilograms (6 to 8 pounds) of vegetables. They also wanted it to be portable so that it
could be moved out to make room for family gatherings.

The ChotuKool has undergone several alterations after every little detail, including pricing
and color (red and blue were the clear winners) was discussed with a select group of villagers
and micro-finance institutions. The villagers will also act as marketers and will earn a
commission of approximately $3 per fridge sold. This fridge is targeted at households who
earn approximately $5 a day, of whom there are almost 100 million in India.

Addressing the power shortage in rural India

Products like the the ChotuKool overcome technological and social barriers and address the
one of the most pressing issues in India.

India hosts the world’s largest population deprived of electricity. Ninety two percent of this
population lives in rural India, equaling about 380 million people or 71.7 million households.
The quality and quantity of power these people have access to is very poor and consequently
the country has very little development happening in rural areas.

The power situation in rural India cannot be fixed overnight and until it is, products like this
are needed to make people's lives a little better. Effective refrigeration in rural areas can help
people extend their access to not only food, but also essential drugs.
Godrej and Boyce, which has interests in real estate, FMCG, industrial engineering,
appliances, furniture, security and agri care, plans to launch ChotuKool in India by March
2010 at a price of US$69 or Rs 3250.

In 2005, on the day G. Sunderraman completed 25 years of work at Godrej and Boyce
Manufacturing Co. Ltd, he walked into the office of his chairman, Jamshyd Godrej, and
declared: “I think I want to do something different now.”

Tailor-made: G. Sunderraman and

Sanjay Lonial with the ChotuKool, a
low-cost refrigerator designed for
India’s poorest households. Abhijit
Bhatlekar/Mint

“All right. What would you like to do?”

Sunderraman remembers Godrej asking.

The truth was, Sunderraman didn’t

really know. In 25 years, he had
caromed across the organization,
accreting a vast set of skills. He had
worked in marketing and sales, in
manufacturing, in sourcing and purchase, in supply-chain logistics, and in quality
management and strategy. What Sunderraman needed was a role that could synthesize all that
came before it. “And then,” he says, “things just happened.”

Since 2007, Sunderraman has been working—first by himself, and then with further staff
numbering precisely one—on the ChotuKool, a low-cost refrigerator designed for India’s
poorest households.

In between his other duties as vice-president for corporate development, he worried over
equations of cost and power loads and performance coefficients, nudging these elements into
a fine balance. Even though the ChotuKool entered the market earlier this year, Sunderraman
says its development isn’t over. “We’re still taking in feedback, still working on
improvements.”

Also Read More articles in the series

The ChotuKool is a squat cube, enclosing just under 40 litres of volume and coloured in
shades that range from a quiet blue-grey to a striking candy-red. It opens on top to conserve
cold air; in fact, the lid hinges out and comes away entirely, in two detachable parts. A power
socket sits embedded in the lid, next to two axial fans that dispel heat. When it’s empty, it
weighs 7kg. When it’s plugged in, it can cool its contents to 20 degrees below the ambient
temperature. The ChotuKool doesn’t attempt to be an icebox; it aspires only to be a
serviceable domestic refrigerator.

The ambition to cool the food of rural India is not new. In fact, in a country where a third of
all food is lost to spoilage (according to the United Nations Commission on Sustainable
Development) and where refrigerator penetration is less than 18% (according to the
Consumer Electronics and Appliances Manufacturers’ Association), that ambition becomes
nearly inevitable.

Previous efforts to fill this gap have floundered. In 2002, for instance, an Indo-European Eco-
Design team unveiled a Rs5,000 fridge; that fridge hasn’t been seen since. But the dream
refuses to die.

Three years ago, a start-up called Promethean Power Systems won $100,000 (Rs46.5 lakh)
from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work on inexpensive refrigeration for
Indian milk producers. “I look at it as one of the last frontiers to conquer—bringing
refrigeration anywhere in the world,” Sorin Grama, Promethean’s co-founder, has said.

How to wreck markets

Properly engineered, a low-cost fridge would be a disruptive innovation—a term derived

from the theories of Clayton Christensen, a Harvard academic. A disruptive innovation can
wreck a market’s contours. It can discover undiscovered consumers, give them a rethought
variation on an existing product, and thereby even change the way the existing product is
made.

This isn’t just market segmentation, Sunderraman says. “Segmentation would be to take a
high-end product and strip it of some features. This is developing a new product altogether.”

Godrej’s 113-year history is replete with innovations, many proving “disruptive” in

hindsight. Shortly after its founding, by Ardeshir and Pirojsha Godrej, the company produced
the first levered lock in India. Since then, a succession of Godrejes have shepherded the firm
through further innovations: a soap made of vegetable oil instead of animal tallow, for
instance, or the ubiquitous, comforting almirah.

But the ChotuKool marks the first time, Sunderraman observes, that Godrej consciously set
out to create a disruptive innovation. It also marks the first time that a team, however small,
has been tasked to only innovate. “You need people dedicated to that, because it can
otherwise get lost in the day-to-day imperatives,” Sunderraman notes. “Sanjay here,” he says,
gesturing to his ChotuKool foreman, Sanjay Lonial, “lives, breathes and eats innovation.”
Lonial smiles self-consciously. “It’s true. I do.”

In a way, the ChotuKool is of a piece with Godrej’s custom of slipping into the customer’s
head and understanding what she requires—a process driving 80% of Godrej’s innovations,
Sunderraman estimates.

Bala Balachandran, a member of the Godrej board and a professor at the Kellogg School of
Management, recalls a strategy meeting seven years ago, which veered to the conclusion
“that we needed to re-emphasize base-of-the-pyramid consumers, and have products and
services tailor-made for them”.

When the low-cost fridge was mooted, Sunderraman figured a development cycle of a few
months—a gross underestimate, as it turned out. A market research firm could dig up only
wan insight, so he brushed them aside and, with the same meticulousness he displays in even
the most casual conversations, set out to conduct what he calls his version of “ethnographic
studies”.

Sunderraman and Lonial travelled for many months, staying in villages in every quadrant of
India, observing what their customers needed and how they would use a fridge. Then, as
Godrej’s engineers came up with iterations, these were promptly dispatched to villages in
Maharashtra to be stress-tested in ground conditions and to elicit feedback from their users.

A few results were predictable. The families they visited earned as little as Rs7,000 per year,
so costs had to be kept low; the ChotuKool is priced roughly at Rs3,500. Electricity was
sporadic and, for these families, expensive. The ChotuKool, thus, runs off 12-volt DC supply,
mutated from the mains AC feed by a laptop-style converter that has been amped up by
Godrej; during power cuts, the fridge can be kept alive on an inverter or a battery. “The
average electricity bill for running the ChotuKool is only Rs60-70 per month,” Lonial says.

Some first-hand observations Sunderraman couldn’t have done without. The few families
with second-hand fridges rarely used their freezers, so Godrej knew that deep chilling was
unnecessary. Servicing was a constant worry, so every one of the ChotuKool’s essential
components sits in one of the lid’s two detachable parts, which can be toted even by a child to
the nearest service centre. Even the candy-red colour scheme emerged from a straw poll of
600 women in the village of Osmanabad.

Most crucially, Godrej abandoned the regular method of cooling by compressor—found in

every domestic fridge and even in the Eco-Design team’s prototype—and opted for a
technique known as thermoelectric cooling. Via a phenomenon called the Peltier Effect, after
its French discoverer, thermoelectric cooling applies an electric current to the junction of two
well-chosen metals; one end of that junction grows hotter, the other end cooler.

As a technique, this is hardly new. Jean-Charles Peltier died in 1845, and in the West, small
thermoelectric fridges have for many years done yeoman service in keeping beer cold at
barbecues. “But this is the first time thermoelectric cooling has been applied to a low-cost
solution,” Sunderraman says. “And really…using it for bigger fridges would be like fitting a
two-stroke engine onto a Mercedes-Benz.”

Its ambition and pedigree have made the ChotuKool a heavily anticipated product—the
TataNano of appliances, as it were. “The technology is there, but I’m doubtful about the
cost,” says S. Srinivasa Murthy, a professor at the regrigeration and air-conditioning lab at
the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai. “Every thermoelectric fridge I’ve seen has been
priced higher or been subsidized at some point. But thermoelectric modules have been very
expensive until recently, when Chinese versions started coming in. Maybe that’s driven the
price down.”

In the sense that thermoelectric cooling has been around for decades, Sunderraman says,
designing the ChotuKool “wasn’t rocket science”. But innovation, he implies, needn’t always
involve sparkling new technologies.

Often, the most creative aspect of innovation lies in repurposing an existing technology well
enough to fit the needs of the people who need it most.

Godrej and Boyce Started operations (in India): 1897

Made in India: The first indigenous lock, safe and typewriter; the first-ever soap made with
vegetable oils; the classic Godrej almirah; India’s first CFC-free refrigerators