Getting a Genset in Chennai

We have a partnership with the Worth Trust in Chennai, India, to do data entry for Bookshare.org, funded by the Lavelle Fund. I blogged about it in May: Scanning in Tamil Nadu. Our international Bookshare.org manager, Viji Dilip, recently wrote about making a change in what kind of capital equipment to get Worth Trust to help carry out their work:

Strange as it may sound I grew up with hearing this often, "Everyone please save all your files now as the current will be going off in the next five minutes." OK, there were no computers when I was growing up in India but the current going "off" was very common. Sometimes for an hour or two and in summer for several hours at a stretch when the Electricity Board scheduled power cuts for every city . These power cuts could last from anywhere from an hour to three hours in the afternoon depending on when the supervisor at the EB came back from lunch. "There was no current" was our equivalent of "The dog ate my home work" as power cuts would happen routinely in the evening and nights as well.

So when Venkataraman, the manager at Worth Trust asked me if he could buy a generator instead of a scanner as there were frequent power cuts I could totally relate to it. However I was not sure Lisa would approve a "Genset".

I was totally surprised when Lisa thought that it was a legitamate request and that a generator would help reduce the loss of precious processing time.

This generator should support the computer lab and the air conditioning that is required to keep the computers from getting over heated.