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If electricity is playing havoc, some of the answers could come from the computer on your desk. First came PCs that can run on car batteries without electricity for hours. Now, some enterprising vendors are offering back-up power for your fans and lights too. Next on cards is a PC that can be charged by pedaling and won't need a battery either. Unreliable power supply is not keeping the online stock traders away from markets either. Many of them are turning to their smartphones whenever they are faced with a long power-cut.

While these might not exactly sound like big technology break-throughs, simple solutions like these could take computing closer to bridging the digital divide. And India is not alone in helping bridge the digital divide by providing computing powers to the electricity-starved areas. A similar solution came form Nicholas Negroponte of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States who assembled a team of researchers and hardware vendors to produce a laptop that can run on commonly available batteries or conventional electrical power. It also has a hand crank that can power the computer for a few minutes at a time in emergencies. Massachusetts-based FirstMileSolutions.com has developed a wireless package that can be installed in villages and draws electrical power from a grid or a generator or solar panels. Few like US-based Advanced Micro Devices' personal Internet communicator are commercially available. It can run on nearly any kind of electric power like batteries, low-quality power sources and is engineered to withstand sudden electric disruptions.

Closer home, the booming retail segment seems to be driving the need for innovation. As value-added tax is pushing even small retailers to keep records of their transactions, many of them are looking at PCs seriously. "

As VAT catches on, even relatively smaller retailers need to keep records of inventories and bills and we see increased interest in computer-based point of sale terminals and retail solutions,'' confirms HCL Infosystems chairman and CEO, Ajai Chowdhry.

When HCL started selling retail solutions including a cash drawer, programmable keyboard, magnetic stripe reader and a customer pole display coupled with a billing and inventory package, it was aiming only at big retail chains like, Big Bazar, Madura Garments, Pizza Hut, Subhiksha and Trinetra supermarkets. It soon started eyeing the untapped potential in small shops spread across the country. This is when it came up with the idea of adding RP2 system that can provide continuous power for about eight hours.

Here you can attach your PC to a car battery and all you need is about two to three hours of electricity to just charge the battery to run your PC full time for seven to eight hours.

And now the company is going a step ahead by attaching a special cycle users could pedal to charge that battery. Targeted to be out in the market by February, the system can work even in areas where there is no electricity.

“Only an Indian company could have thought of a solution to address Indian needs,” exclaims Ajai Chowdhry.

While the HCL system was designed with erratic power conditions in mind, users have turned to smart cellphones when there is no electricity. With smart phones packing in decent computing power, at least basic PC work can be done. However, mobile have sometimes proved to be effective as the ideal platform when there is no electricity. Financial Technologies, which offers stock trading solutions on cellphones from Nokia expected its solutions to help people buy and sell stocks when they were away from their desktop terminals. However, subscribers have found it the best means to trade in absence of electricity. "We were surprised when some users from Jabalpur told us that they were using their mobile phones for trading in market, when there was no power for hours,'' explains Financial Technologies director and chief technology architect , Dewang Neralla.

Whether it is villages, small towns or even metropolitan cities, long power cuts, no electricity, voltage fluctuations are part of every Indian's life. And options like these could help bridge not only the digital but also the electrical divide.