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Indian Families To Receive Rice Availability Alerts -- via SMS

by Evan Shamoon on January 10, 2008 at 08:04 AM



In what may be the ultimate illustration of our hyper-industrialized planet, a regional government in India has announced plans to send alerts about the availability of rice and the supply of food to its citizens...via SMS (a type of wireless phone message).

Thanks to India's subsidized food distribution program, each family in the country is granted 35kg of rice per month; now, when it's available at the distribution center, SMS alerts will be sent out to registered families.

The program apparently will cover 3.4 million families -- or about 60 percent of the state's 20.08 million people. Of course, this all requires that the families have both cell phones and Web access, as they'll have to register their cell numbers at the food and civil supplies department website. Officials have admitted they are unclear how many families actually access to this kind of consumer technology we often take for granted.

Once they start checking Switched everyday for updates on the latest rice cookers, it's so on.

From Textually

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Tags: cell, india, mobile phone, MobilePhone, rice, sms, wireless

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