Guest Editorial

It is a great pleasure to bring out the Special Issue of IETE Technical Review on Information Communication Technology Initiative for Rural Developments. The special issue has been brought out based on the selected papers from IETE Mid Term Symposium, ICTIRD 2006 held during April 7-9 at Kolkata. Out of the total number of thirty papers presented in the symposium only seven papers have been selected for publication in this special issue after a rigorous review by the reputed reviewers.

With the unrestrained advancement of Information and Communication Technologies, which play a vital role in the new global economy, our main concern is to reap the benefits of ICT for the vast population in the rural sector. The benefits of ICT are reaching far and wide transcending the sectoral boundaries in agriculture, health care, education, e-governance and others to name a few. The current issue highlights on the novel works carried out to harvest the benefits of Information and Communication technologies in these sectors with an emphasis for the rural masses.

The article by S Mitra, J Bera, M Mitra, S Sengupta and B B Chaudhuri discusses on the development of a complete diagnostic telecardiology system for rural health care. The system can generate an initial report about the abnormality of the incoming ECG from an inbuilt knowledge base. The generated report will then be sent back to the patient by the system.

The article by Mainak Mukhopadhyay, Moutusi Mondal, Binay Kumar Sarkar and Ajay Chakraborty focuses on the adaptive equalizer for spectrum management and equalization of unknown time varying for Software Defined Radio. The adaptive equalizer works using the LMS algorithm.

The article on the switch beam array antenna for sectorized optimum power distribution into discrete localities of rural areas has been authored by Mainak Mukhopadhyay, Atanu Roy, Binay Kumar Sarkar and Ajay Chakraborty. The paper highlights the performance analysis of Switch Beam Smart antenna using microstrip patch elements with simulation results obtained by using CST Microwave Studio.

The article authored by Shubhajit Roy Chowdhury and Hiranmay Saha emphasizes on the development of an FPGA based smart embedded system for rural telediagnostic applications. The embedded system developed is smart enough to predict the future physiological state of a patient based on the past physiological data and is ideal for providing automated clinical diagnostic support in rural areas.

The article by Saurav Ganguly, Mainak Mukhopadhyay and Ajay Chakraborty describes the design of a Frequency Modulated Community Radio Base Station for rural community. Such a type of technology can serve the need of the hour – linking the rural masses with the urban citizens and providing basic communication facilities for the masses.

The article by Yogesh Awate, Jagger Bodas, Pushpak Bhattacharya and Sachin Deshpande discusses on the natural language based generation of search results in a meaning based multilingual search engine. The design of a deconverter with Marathi as the target language has been discussed. The deconversion process proceeds through the phases of syntax planning, lexical replacement, case mark insertion and morph generation.