EVERY DAY IS A BAD DAY FOR MALTHUSIANS:

Half of the children in India are chronically malnourished. So imagine the potential benefits if there were a simple way to increase the milk production from cows by, say, a quart per week? Or imagine if there were a better way for small farmers to cultivate rice -- the staple food of half the world -- one that required no costly inputs, used less water, and substantially increased yields?

Wouldn't these things be development miracles?

Well, they are not miracles; they are realistic possibilities. The problem is that most farmers in the developing world don't know about them -- or don't know how to implement them successfully.

Consider: an aquatic fern called azolla, which can be readily cultivated and added to animal feed, can boost production of cows milk by 15 to 20 percent. An approach known as System of Rice Intensification (SRI), which involves transplanting rice saplings, spacing them in a grid, keeping the soil drier, and carefully weeding plots, can produce remarkable gains. SRI has been called one of the most important agricultural innovations of the past 50 years, yet it is employed by a fraction of farmers (pdf). And there are countless other opportunities: for instance, orange-fleshed sweet potatoes from a home garden can avert Vitamin A deficiency, which causes hundreds of thousands of children in the developing world to go blind or die each year.

One of the great paradoxes in today's world is that information is so easy to transmit --few places on earth are beyond the reach of cellphones or televisions -- and yet our efforts to get life-saving, livelihood-boosting information to people in a form that sticks, a form that will actually change behavior, are frequently disappointing.

That was a problem that gripped Rikin Gandhi, a young American-born software engineer, while he was working in Bangalore for Microsoft Research India seven years ago. Rikin was interested in how rural telecenters might be used to spread education and information about health and agriculture in remote areas. A colleague suggested he investigate the application of the Digital StudyHall model in rural Karnataka. Gandhi did just that -- and his experience led to the creation of Digital Green, a platform and process for extending knowledge and influencing behavior that has seized the attention of many development experts.

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