i4donline: July - August 2003 issue: A vision for rural India: Transforming rural India

India needs creative solutions to start a revolution which can take its villages fast forward in time – converting them into economically viable units and growth engines, harnessing the power of the villagers, and opening up new horizons with the promise of a better tomorrow.

Village vacuum
Little has changed in the villages of India in the past decades. Schools have been built, but many still lack teachers and appropriate teaching methods. There are phone lines in many villages, but getting a dial tone is still a challenge. Electricity supply is at best intermittent. Health care is still limited in its availability.

India’s villages are dependent on agriculture for much of their sustenance. Drought is a common occurrence across much of India. As a result, villagers, for the most part, remain a poor lot - the per capita income of India’s villages is perhaps no more than Rs 12-18,000 (USD 240-360, USD1 = INR50) per annum, as compared to the national average of Rs 25,000 (USD 500).

Perhaps, most importantly, the opportunities available to villagers are not dramatically different from what they were many years ago. Villages in India are where you live if you have no other option.

And yet, India is in its villages. 70% of Indians live there. Even as one India races ahead with optimism towards the future, there is another India which seems to be stuck in the past. If India as a nation has to progress, there is little doubt that India’s villages too have to progress.

Transforming Rural India is a challenge that should focus the best of Indian minds – it is perhaps the single biggest barrier to making India a developed country, and achieving the 10% growth that CK Prahalad talks about. India’s villages need disruptive innovations to make the giant leap forward.

In this paper, I discuss the role that technology can play in transforming Rural India. Of course, one can argue that what the poor need is food, water and electricity more than technology. It is an argument we have been making since our Independence.