The Simputer, short for "Simple Inexpensive Multilingual People's Computer," was a pioneering initiative developed in India in the early 2000s by a team led by Vijay Chandru, Swami Manohar, Ramesh Hariharan, and V. Vinay. The concept behind the Simputer was to create an affordable computing device that could be used by people with limited access to technology, particularly in rural and remote areas. The goal was to bridge the digital divide by providing a simple, user-friendly device that could enable a wide range of applications, including education, healthcare, and commerce.

In terms of technological innovation, Simputer had an impressive list of firsts. It was the first Linux-operated handheld device with writing capabilities, the first handheld device to have a USB master port, and the first to have an accelerometer. Over 180 million students were in school, and only a lucky handful had just become familiar with computers. The digital divide was growing. In this backdrop, during the IT.Com event of October 1998, touted as the first large-scale IT expo in the country, the Bangalore Declaration on Information Technology for Developing Countries was released. One of the goals of this declaration was to make a Simple Inexpensive Mobile comPUTER (SIMPUTER) to provide access to information technology for every citizen, regardless of their social or economic status. This spurred four faculty members in the Department of Computer Science and Automation (CSA) at IISc – Vijay Chandru, Swami Manohar, Ramesh Hariharan, and V Vinay – to imagine and develop a low-cost handheld computer, one that could be accessible for everyone. Simputer was not the only innovation that came out of the partnership between the four. While Swami Manohar and V Vinay were setting up a company called PicoPeta to market the Simputer, Ramesh Hariharan and Vijay Chandru were also building a genomic company for personalised medicine called Strand Life Sciences.