Lincoln Kaye has been writing and teaching in Asia for 24 years, including six years in India. His China memoir, Cousin Felix Meets the Buddha, will be published later this year.

6:00 a.m. We're unceremoniously dumped on the platform at Raipur Junction. At an out-of-the-way whistle-stop like this, Shyam and I have just time enough to offload our motorcycle from the luggage compartment before the Vishakapatnam Link Express chugs off toward India's industrialized Steel Belt. So early in the morning there's only a lone coolie on the platform to accept our baggage receipt and hand over Shyam's 15-year-old 100 cc Suzuki. Well before the daily onslaught of late-March morning Tiger Heat, we set off down Mahatma Gandhi Road to begin our new job, field-testing the Simputer.

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Designed by a quartet of U.S.-trained Indian scientists in Bangalore, the Simputer is a powerful, low-cost, palm-top that runs for hours on penlight batteries. Intended as India's home-grown answer to the "digital divide," it does long-distance medical diagnostics, basic literacy training, micro-banking, commodity trading, and other applications aimed at the poorest and remotest villagers. Its input and output systems are designed for illiterates: a multilingual voice synthesizer and lots of simple graphics. It uses Linux-based software to keep costs down.

Once they're mass-produced, Simputers should cost less than $200 apiece. That's still too expensive for most villagers to privately own. Instead, each hamlet can keep its Simputer at some common focal point, and any end-user need only purchase a 1-dollar "smart card" that records personal data and bills for usage a few rupees at a time.

The locale chosen for the field trial, the newly fledged Central Indian state of Chhattisgarh (which was expressly gerrymandered for its high concentration of aboriginals and "untouchables"), couldn't be more challenging. Once out of the industrial environs of Raipur, the state capital, Chhattisgarh presents a tableau of mud-hut villages and forested hills.

I remember my last trip here a couple of years ago—a real time-travel excursion. Every kilometer we hiked into the mountains, we seemed to shed a century or two of modernity: First the roads ended, then the power lines, then the bore-wells. In the deepest interior hamlets we found hardly even any metal in evidence. Not much clothing, either. What in the world would such people do with palm-top computers and smart cards? Would the benefits outweigh the cultural costs? It was with such questions in mind that Shyam and I signed on as volunteer project evaluators.

Our first stop today is hardly that remote. Pulling into Bhimcha village, we park in the shade of a peepul tree next to the panchayat (village council) hall. A few curious villagers file into the chai stall across the way to observe us, but the noisy dice game under the tree continues unperturbed by our arrival. The all-male panchayat meeting gets off to a slow start. "Could this machine of yours tell me about fish diseases?" a farmer asks. "Could it keep us up to date on exams?" the local school-teacher wants to know.

Our team-leader from Bangalore, Alex Abraham, assures them the Simputer can do all of that, but there are no follow-up questions. Nor are the villagers very forthcoming when asked about their educational ambitions for their children. Through the doorway, we see another member of our party, Dr. Sarala Arunagiri, striding past the peepul tree, tote bag slung over her shoulder and sari streaming, with a couple of women in tow. We slip off to follow and catch up with them in a whitewashed courtyard down a twisty lane.

Sarala's already got her Simputer out—a simple, chunky box with just five buttons and a black-and-white LED screen. The women stare raptly as she walks them through a menu. They pass the machine around from hand to hand—bent grandmas, young mothers with babies in their laps, a couple of uniformed school girls.

The local nurse practitioner ventures to try a few buttons and makes her way through a commodity-pricing menu with aplomb. Sarala then steers them toward a medical diagnostic menu for TB. What other illnesses can it handle? a middle aged matron asks. Does it understand "women's problems?" Sarala wordlessly signals the two of us to butt out.

We retreat to the town square to find Alex already resting under the peepul tree, swigging bottled Bisleri water. Very fruitful session, he assures us. Fish diseases, hmm. He makes a note on his steno pad. Tomorrow morning he flies back to Bangalore to start augmenting the Simputer's content pages for the next round of field trials.

Alex came to Simputer after three decades as a marketing executive with Unilever, selling consumer goods throughout India and the rest of developing Asia. "The reason we could always outstrip the sales of our arch-rival Procter & Gamble," he boasts, is that "they stuck to the cities while we'd always go those last extra miles to the village at the very end of the road. Selling the Simputer is no different from selling soap, except that you're working at another level of abstraction. This product doesn't just change people's habits. It has the potential to change the whole way they think of themselves and the world."

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