Need of the hour:
India has witnessed unprecedented economic growth post liberalisation, with the economy growing at 8.4% in the fiscal 2005-06. Most of this growth has been in the services sector which is concentrated in India’s rapidly growing urban spaces. But sadly the 65% of India’s population that live in rural areas is systematically excluded from the fruits of economic prosperity and contributes only 25% to the GDP. Over the past five years there has been a veritable explosion of technology and consumerism in India, but this has occurred largely in urban and middle class communities. Rural India still needs to catch up and they still appear much as they have ever done—thousands of villages, surrounded by modest farms worked by many landless laboarers with low incomes and poor prospects for improvements in living standards.

Access to Technology and Market potential for IT in rural India
The bottom of the pyramid in India is the one in its 600,000 villages, numbering about 150-200 million households (600-800 million people). This segment presently has little or no access to computing cybercafés but can pay a few rupees each time they access a service like getting land record details, grievance redressal, getting commodity prices, literacy, and many others. But very quickly these rupees start adding up, limiting usage. The question is: how much money can be invested by a household in this segment for access to computing? Assuming an income of about Rs 5,000 per month from the 250 households in the village over three years, gives us a total of Rs 180,000 for a village.