"What we're doing is essentially space technology at low cost", Says Lakshminarayan Kannan, Founder of Vortex Engineering, laughing. "To do anything in rural India it has to be cost-effective, robust, reliable and energy-efficient", he adds. "It's like sending something to Mars. You can't send an engineer up there to fix it. The only difference is that you don't have budget constraints in space technology!" The cash machine (ATM) which Kannan and his colleagues in Chennai developed is remarkable. With the lowest power consumption in the world - up to 90% less than conventional alternatives - it can run on solar power. Moreover it costs just one-third of conventional ATMs, despite having sophisticated inbuilt fingerprint scanning which allows even illiterate farmers to access the formal banking system.
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