Most tech can be shaped to have more benefits than negatives: Bill Gates

Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist, is on a three-day visit to India to assess the work that his foundation is carrying out here. In an interview to TOI, he talks about a range of issues from path-breaking toilet technology to taxes and predicting the future of health. Excerpts:

India has taken a giant leap in improving people’s access to toilet, yet there are challenges like quality of infrastructure and water supply. You have talked of technology resolving such issues…

We are doing two kinds of innovations: One is the ability to process fecal sludge with a lower cost plant. That still requires you to collect the fecal sludge and move it to the plant, but we will have plants of different sizes and lower cost than what’s existed before.