How many IT projects do you hear about that are really life-changing? How many IT projects have the potential to really improve the life of more than a billion people? And, how many projects like this were started by one individual putting his hand in his pocket to inject some personal cash into an idea he had while walking down Piccadilly and observing British ambulances tearing up the road to the next RTC (road traffic collision – I knew all those episodes of Casualty on the BBC iPlayer would come in useful eventually)?

Ramalinga Raju, the founder and chairman of Satyam, was the man walking along the street near to the Ritz hotel in London a couple of years ago when those ambulances went by. He wondered out loud to some of his colleagues why there was no centrally coordinated emergency service in India that could get an ambulance to a person in need within minutes.

Instead of just wondering, he put £1.5m of his own cash into a personal side project, creating a call response unit and equipping ambulances with the kit they might need for 50 or so common emergencies, including pregnancy and snake bites. From this initial programme came what is now the EMRI - Emergency Management and Research Institute.

Today, this is a free service delivered through hi-tech emergency call response centres with over 785 ambulances across the Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Uttarakhand states in India. With the projected expansion of fleet and services set to spread across more states, EMRI will have more than 10,000 ambulances by 2010. That’s a national ambulance service covering a population of more than a billion and all created within just a few years. Satyam proved what can be done with technology and now the government is coming on board to fund the expansion.

I just had a conversation this morning with Som Sarma, the European vice president of Satyam about how this project started, why it is important for Satyam and India, and how they might use this expertise in future. You can hear an audio podcast of that conversation by going to the iTunes podcast directory and searching for ‘Talking Outsourcing’ or by clicking here to play it back from the web.