information technology and rural development

Information Technology and Rural
Development in India
Abstract
How can information technology (IT) contribute to rural development? What
are the channels through which impacts can be realized, and what are the practical
means for realizing potential benefits? This paper examines several ongoing
projects that aim to provide IT-based services to rural populations in India.
These projects are distinguished by the goal of commercial sustainability, which
supports scalability and, therefore, more widespread benefits. The analysis
highlights the common building blocks required for successful implementation,
and the relative strengths and weaknesses of different approaches.
Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
Information Technology and Rural Development in India*
Nirvikar Singh
University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
March 2004
Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
1. Introduction
It may seem paradoxical that modern information technology (IT), associated in
our minds with developed country markets and capital-intensive methods of production,
has any relevance for a country where many millions still lack basic needs. Nevertheless,
there are many efforts underway in India and other developing countries to demonstrate
the concrete benefits of IT for rural populations, and to do so in a manner that makes
economic sense.1
This paper outlines the conceptual and empirical case for the use of IT in India’s
rural development. Section 2, provides a broad discussion of the potential role of IT in
broad-based economic development. Section 3 examines the conceptual issues from the
perspective of demand for, and supply of IT-based services to rural populations in a
developing country. Section 4 discusses the lessons of some of the efforts underway in
India, including the work of Aksh, Drishtee, ITC, n-Logue and TARAhaat. Section 5 is a
brief conclusion.
2. IT, Economics and Development2
In abstract, there are two types of potential economic gains from the use of IT.
First, there are both static and dynamic efficiency gains. Static gains are one-time, and
come from more efficient use of scarce resources, allowing higher consumption in the
present. It is useful to distinguish two kinds of static efficiency gains. One kind pertains
to increases in operating efficiency, while the other comes from reduced transaction
costs. In both cases, the channel for gains is through more effective and lower cost
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
information storage, processing and communication. Dynamic gains come from higher
growth, potentially raising the entire future stream of consumption.
The second type of potential benefit comes from reductions in economic
inequality, to the extent that such reductions are an agreed-upon social goal, and
therefore a social benefit. The two types of gains may conflict, if growth requires
increased inequality, or they may be mutually reinforcing, where broad sharing of the
benefits of growth enhances the rate of growth. We can discuss the role of IT in
achieving greater economic gains along both dimensions, without having to commit to a
particular position on the relationship between inequality and growth. However, a focus
on using IT for rural development is, at least on the surface, supportive of reduced
inequality along with increased efficiency and growth.
Of course, benefits that are measurable as increased market-based economic
activity, and hence show up in national accounts statistics, are not the only component of
development. Development can also include improvements in the capabilities of the
population, such as education, health and nutrition, independently of any direct or
indirect economic impact. The ability to participate in democratic decision-making also
falls into this category. Broad-based improvements in capabilities can also have positive
impacts on long-run economic well being, but this is not a necessary condition for
desiring such improvements. The role of IT in effecting improvements along noneconomic
dimensions is also considered in this paper.
Turning to specific impacts, note that IT involves the electronic processing,
storage and communication of information, where anything that can be represented in
digital form is included in the term ‘information’. Thus news, entertainment, personal
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
communications, educational material, blank and filled-out forms, announcements,
schedules, and so on are all information. Software programs that process data (searching,
tabulating, and calculating, for example) are also information in this sense, representing a
particular kind of intermediate good. We can use standard economic characterizations to
classify the different kinds of information. For example, entertainment, personal
communications, and sometimes news, are final goods. Educational material, job
announcements, or some kinds of news (weather news for farmers, for example) are
intermediate goods, typically used for improving income-earning opportunities.
Information goods typically have the characteristic that one person’s use does not
reduce their availability for another person. Thus, a message or weather news can be
viewed by many people, simultaneously or sequentially. Depending on the content of the
news or message, different people may place different valuations on the information.
Only friends and relatives may be interested in a personal message, all farmers in a
district may be interested in local weather news, and so on. The ability to share
information among users can impact the feasibility of providing it on a commercial basis.
IT dramatically increases shareability of information, and this affects the economics of
private provision of information goods and services.
The government may provide information goods because they are shareable and
non-excludable (pure public goods). The classic example of a pure public good is
national defense, but such goods may also be local in nature, such as public parks or law
and order. Of course many local shareable goods can be provided exclusively, in which
case private provision is a feasible alternative, in a club-like arrangement. Here,
government provision may be justified more on equity grounds than on the basis of
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
failure of private provision. In some cases, government financing through taxes or
statutory user charges can be combined with outsourcing of delivery to private providers
to achieve both equity and efficiency goals.
Often, private provision is feasible, but neglects the spillover benefits that it
creates, in which case government subsidization may be socially beneficial. For example,
primary education has private economic benefits that people are willing to pay for, but it
can also have substantial non-economic benefits to the individual and to others in the
society (improved understanding, ability to make sound judgments, political decisionmaking
capacity, and so on). Additional roles of government that are important to bring
out are in redistribution to achieve equity objectives, and in regulation of private
activities through licensing and certification. In both cases, the government also uses
economic resources, and IT has a potential role in increasing the efficiency of
government.
For both government and private provision, one of IT’s main direct benefits is in
increasing efficiency by economizing on resource use in the operations of firms as well
as in market transactions. Information that would otherwise be conveyed through face-toface
contact, post, courier, print delivery, telegraph or telephone may instead be
communicated in digital electronic form via the Internet. Efficiency gains from Internet
use are not automatic: the telephone, in particular, is an efficient means of
communication for many types of information. IT also requires new investment, so the
benefits of trips, time and paper saved must be weighed against the costs of installing and
maintaining the new infrastructure. Efficiency benefits of IT are not restricted to the
communication itself. IT can improve the efficiency of the telephone network, and it can
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
make it possible to track and analyze communications. Word processing, maintaining
accounts, inventory management, and other such activities that may not require longdistance
communications are also made more efficient by IT.
Experience with Internet use in developed countries suggests that information
exchange related to the completion of market transactions is especially valuable. The
ability of IT-based communications (combined with storage and processing) to bring
together buyers and sellers more effectively represents major potential gains. These gains
can come about through lower search costs, better matching of buyers and sellers, and
even the creation of new markets. The successes of auction and employment websites in
the US illustrate these gains. In the rural Indian context, farmers selling their crops and
buying inputs, parents seeking matrimonial alliances for their children, and job seekers
are all potential users of Internet-based matching services.
Efficiency gains of IT can also come about through the enabling of new goods
and services. In many cases, the new good is related to something available earlier, but is
presented in a form that reduces costs and expands the size of the market. For example,
recorded music is a mass-consumption item, whereas only a small minority of the
population could afford or have access to live performances by the highest quality
musicians. Educational material is another example where recording and duplication can
replace more expensive, skilled-labor-intensive alternatives for delivery. The possibilities
for interactivity with IT-based educational materials illustrate the advantages of IT over
older technologies based only on recording and duplication. Interactivity also implies
personalization, in that an individual can select the precise content that he or she wishes
to see. This feature also distinguishes IT-based content from what was available through
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
previous technologies. Finally, the sheer volume of information that is accessible through
IT is much greater than before: this also allows new kinds of services to be provided at a
cost that is affordable to larger segments of the population.
We have outlined the potential static efficiency benefits of IT, but the direct
dynamic benefits in terms of higher growth are harder to identify. Of course, if IT
economizes on current resources, more is available for investment, which can increase
growth. If IT increases the efficiency of education delivery to the broader population, this
investment in people (human capital acquisition) is also likely to lead to higher growth.
IT may also have positive impacts through impacts on the innovation process. For
example, IT can make innovation easier by allowing simulation and low-cost testing of
new designs or searching through possible chemical compounds for beneficial drugs.
Finally, IT may speed the diffusion of innovations through better communications, which
may stimulate further innovation – though this last channel is speculative.
An important barrier to realizing the economic benefits of IT is the oftensubstantial
up-front cost of investment in new infrastructure – both hardware and
software. In developed countries such as the US, large potential customer bases and
efficient capital markets help overcome this barrier. Hardware and software designed for
developed country markets can easily be adapted to serve higher income consumers in
developing countries, but this leaves out the majority of the population in developing
countries. Thus, one potential consequence of IT is an exacerbation of inequality, as only
higher income groups enjoy its benefits – this is the so-called ‘digital divide’.
On the other hand, because government-provided goods and services, including
redistributive transfer payments, are often aimed at lower income groups, to the extent
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
that IT can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of government, the benefits of IT
will be more widely spread, partly reducing ‘digital divide’ concerns. However,
achieving these benefits requires more than just internal use of IT: beneficiaries of
government services (particularly the economically disadvantaged) must be able to
access IT resources also. While governments may invest in such front-end interfaces with
citizens (and have done so in developed countries), the cost of doing so for governments
in developing countries may be prohibitive. Such governments typically already have
difficulties in raising sufficient resources through taxes and user charges.
While successful examples of implementation of ‘e-governance’ initiatives exist3,
there is a conceptual alternative. This comes from recognizing the fact that citizens
typically incur private costs (often substantial) in availing of government-provided
services. If the use of IT can reduce such costs, even low-income individuals may be
willing to pay at least some fraction of the cost savings, and there is scope for private
provision of intermediate services that reduce the cost of access to government. Of
course, this idea is not specific to IT: private intermediaries already help in filling out
forms, getting access, and so on.4 One difference that IT can make is in reducing costs
even further, often by an order of magnitude. In broad terms (as is also the case with
electronic marketplaces and job-matching boards), IT changes the scope and nature of
intermediation.
Private providers may therefore have a role in delivering IT-based information
services that are complementary to government services, as well as in providing
conventional private goods and services. However, the private individual benefits that
determine the prices charged by private providers may not reflect the overall social
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
benefits of provision. As discussed earlier, these may include benefits such as greater
awareness and participation in the political process. In such cases, there may be a role for
government subsidization of private provision. This assumes that government provision
is likely to be less efficient than private provision, which seems to be true in some cases
in developing as well as developed countries. In either case, richer information flows
increase the transparency with which the government operates, thereby promoting better
monitoring, and potentially – depending on whether electoral and legal institutions are
effective – greater accountability. The ultimate payoff is more efficient delivery of
government services.
Looking at the case of India, in cities and larger towns, cyber kiosks have already
begun to proliferate. Urban population densities, income levels, cultural attitudes and
telecom infrastructure all seem to be sufficient for the commercial success of these
enterprises. The falling cost of hardware and the availability of a variety of English
language software have also supported this trend. Finally, the government’s belated
opening up of Internet service provision to competitive entrants has been a crucial
supporting development. In non-Internet IT-related services, IT education has clearly
taken off in cities as well, inspired by India’s success in software exports.
In rural areas and smaller towns, however, the various demographic and
socioeconomic factors such as income levels, cultural attitudes, and geographic and
social fragmentation may not be present in configurations that would easily enable the
diffusion of commercial access to various IT-enabled services. Furthermore, the market
power of traditional rural intermediaries may act as a barrier to partial innovations in how
matching of buyers and sellers is conducted. Finally, vernacular language requirements
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
and different demand patterns imply the need for software that is tailored for fragmented
rural markets. In the next section, we examine the technical and organizational issues in
implementing widespread rural IT use in India.
3. Rural IT: Issues and Conceptual Framework
We examine the potential for rural IT use, both from supply and demand
perspectives. On the supply side, we examine the technical and organizational issues that
arise for delivering IT-based services to rural populations in India. On the demand side,
we examine the potential benefits that IT can bring to these populations, if the
implementation is successful. We begin with the demand side, as a way of motivating the
supply side issues.
Figure 1: Rural Household Economic Decisions
Saving
Human capital
Consumption
Inputs Selling Operations
Potential sources of demand for IT-based services can be framed in terms of a
simple flow diagram representing the decisions of rural households. We will treat a
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
typical household as engaged in farming, though this will not be true for all of them.
Figure 1 presents a simplified representation of the various economic decisions.
Beginning from the left of Figure 1, input decisions include material inputs such
as seeds, fertilizer and pesticides; and capital inputs such as tractors and land (whether
through purchases or rentals); as well as the credit required for such purposes. The focus
of analysis will be market transactions for inputs. In all cases, there is a potential for
benefiting through improved information about prices, quality and availability. Labor is
also an important input, but the labor market has special characteristics that reduce the
importance of such information in rural contexts.
Operations include decisions with respect to quantity and timing of inputs. A
crucial aspect of agricultural operations is risk management, as both the weather and pest
incidence are extremely variable. Ex ante decisions in the face of uncertainty, as well as
ex post responses to realizations of uncertainty are both important. Predictive and
technical information are both important for agricultural operations.
Continuing to the right of Figure 1, marketing of outputs primarily requires price
information. Increasingly, producing for sale also requires knowledge of quality
requirements in different markets. Selling of produce provides income for consumption,
investment and inputs (the reverse arrows in the figure), as well as generating
information that affects input and production decisions.
Non-production decisions of households can be roughly divided into pure
consumption activities, as well as human capital investment in education and health. The
boundary is fuzzy, since even basic food consumption has nutritional impacts and
therefore a human capital component. These activities generate impacts on operations,
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
since they affect the quality of decision-making, as well as household labor inputs: we
indicate this with the vertical arrows. While poorer households may be severely limited
in their consumption, a significant proportion of rural households in India have incomes
sufficient to support some discretionary consumption. In some cases, consumption may
be only superficially discretionary – social norms may dictate spending on activities
relating to marriage and other life cycle events.
Finally, the rightmost box captures household saving, again something that is not
feasible for all rural households, but is an activity of growing importance. Saving may be
for consumption smoothing, investment, or precautionary reasons.
Even this simplified and summary picture of rural households’ economic activity
illustrates that they engage in a broad range of transactions and decisions with economic
impacts. What is noteworthy besides this complexity is that many decisions are made
with very limited information, and that market interactions are often subject to high
transaction costs, due to imperfections in information, as well as high transportation
costs, inefficient intermediation and time delays. High transaction costs will always
prevent marginal transactions from being undertaken; in extreme cases, the market may
fail to function at all. Given this scenario, the role of IT can be understood in terms of
reducing transaction costs, as well as improving the efficiency of decision making within
households (both as producers and as consumers).
Reductions in communication and transaction costs are particularly beneficial
where they can allow new markets to develop, in the sense that existing goods and
services, otherwise restricted to urban areas, or to a very limited segment of rural
populations, now can be offered to broad cross-sections of the rural population. Examples
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
include financial services, particular types of education, health services, long distance
communications, and expertise on a range of production-related decisions. Whether this
can be done in a sustainable manner depends on the supply conditions for IT-based rural
services.
It must be further understood that the activities outlined, in Figure 1 and the
accompanying discussion, take place within a particular institutional environment. This
includes private actors as well as governments. For example, farmers may obtain credit
and inputs, as well contract their output, to private ‘commission agents,’ even in the
presence of government procurement and government-run local markets. Governments
play a major role in subsidizing inputs, providing infrastructure, and enforcing property
rights. To the extent that these activities are also subject to inefficiencies, it may be the
case that, in order to be successful, IT-based interventions geared towards rural
households will have to simultaneously alter the institutional environment, or else
achieve sufficient scale and scope in order to impel changes in it. We will take this up
later in the paper.
Figure 2: Value Chain for IT-Based Services
HRM and
CRM Applications Computing/
peripherals
Power and
connectivity
Organization
and partners
Turning to the supply side, we can illustrate the various stages of decision-making
and delivery of IT-based services in terms of a typical value chain, as shown in Figure 2.
At each stage of the chain, the IT components include a mix of hardware, software and
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
services. In addition, the creation of an organizational structure and value network is a
critical first step, while managing human resources and customers is vital for successful
final implementation.
We next discuss each of the components of the value chain in Figure 2. The
organizational structure typically requires commercial goals of profitability to be built in.
This is easily done through a standard corporate structure. It is clear that, for scalability,
some minimum size of the organization is required. In addition, there are fixed costs of
innovation that can be spread more effectively across a larger organization. Social goals
can be incorporated in two ways. For organizations that are dedicated specifically to rural
IT-based services delivery, controlling ownership of the corporation by a non-profit
entity provides the social focus. For existing corporations with broader businesses, social
goals may enhance reputation, meet corporate social responsibility guidelines, or
otherwise be consistent with the mission and values of the organization. In other words,
including social goals may make good bottom-line business sense.
For both types of organizations, building the right capabilities requires some
effort. Creating what amounts to a brand new infrastructure for rural IT service delivery
requires a broad mix of skills, and finding talented and trained people who can be
effective in a role that mixes entrepreneurial tasks with corporate line responsibilities, all
in an unfamiliar rural environment, can be a challenge. One solution to the potentially
insurmountable problem of collecting the necessary talent and skills is to enter into
partnerships with other organizations that may provide specific pieces of the overall
package that is needed: application software, content, maintenance services, technology,
marketing, and so on. These partnerships can pose their own problems, particularly in
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
goal alignment and consequent performance monitoring requirements. Of course all these
organizational issues are well recognized in management writing and experience: what is
important is to recognize their criticality in a setting that has more typically been the
arena of pure ‘social service’ entities such as governments and NGOs. It is also critical to
recognize that the organizational innovation required in this case is an order of magnitude
greater than the task of selling consumer goods in rural areas, something that is now
accepted as a given in India. The greater complexity and variety of the services being
delivered through IT is the root cause of this difference.
The second stage of the supply chain in Figure 2 concerns access to electric
power and Internet connectivity. In both cases, a major constraint is the failure of the
public sector to deliver adequate power and telecommunications to rural India.
Privatization has helped in the case of telecommunications, as has technological change.
In fact, innovation in digital communications technologies is the foundation of all rural
IT-based service delivery. While conventional telephone connectivity has often proved
inadequate for Internet access in rural areas, because the quality of existing voice lines is
too poor to sustain data transmission, several innovations provide alternatives that are
likely to be cost effective. These include wireless in local loop (WLL), fiber optic cables,
and high-powered versions of Wi-Fi (802.11 wireless standards). The Internet boom in
the United States clearly played a role in pushing down costs and speeding innovation in
fiber optics and wireless transmission. In some cases, VSAT satellite connectivity has
been used for Internet access, but it is not very cost effective. The major challenges for
connectivity are likely to be regulatory, having to do with interconnection to the main
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
network, and with maintenance, rather than with the fundamental technological choices
and implementation.
Electric power is more of a problem, and this is true throughout India. Battery
backups are a very partial solution to the lack of reliable power supplies, and solar
technologies may be more promising in the near future: they are already in use in existing
rural IT efforts. The difficulty is that having to rely on these alternatives and backups
unnecessarily raises costs of operation. Of course this is true for all of India’s economy.
It is well recognized that the power sector is the major bottleneck, with capacity well
short of demand, and the quality of transmission and distribution remaining poor.
The third stage of the supply chain is the most straightforward, because of the
standardization of components of desktop computing and peripherals, rapid technological
improvements, falling costs of production, and, most recently, price reductions resulting
from changes in tariffs on imported hardware. It is now possible to fully equip a singlecomputer
rural Internet kiosk for less than Rs. 50,000, including CD drive, printer,
scanner, power backup, and web cam. Potentially, the highest cost component is the
operating system, since Windows enjoys a virtual monopoly on the desktop. However,
Microsoft seems to have concessional pricing for socially oriented developing country
initiatives, and this helps to reduce costs. The operating system is still typically in
English, but as long as simple drills can take kiosk operators to local language
applications and content, this is not a substantial usage barrier. One can conclude that this
stage of the supply chain is easiest to implement, with a highly standardized, almost
cookie-cutter approach – although ongoing maintenance can be a challenge. The major
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
business decision is whether to have more than one computer per kiosk, but experience
suggests that one is sufficient for almost all situations, at least in the beginning.
The next stage of the supply chain, namely applications, presents more
challenges. The range of possible applications is vast. Many IT-based services require
non-IT logistics or processes as complements. Availability of local language software
becomes more of a constraint. There is much more variation across localities, not just
regions. Delivery of services or development of content often stretch the resources and
expertise of the primary provider, and require varied partnerships or other contractual
relationships. Deciding the sequencing, scope and sophistication of various applications
can be a major challenge, since many of the services are being offered for the first time,
or are being delivered in novel ways that challenge existing institutional frameworks and
relationships. Pricing for low income markets, where market penetration is limited in any
case, and where some services may be perceived as public goods that are traditionally
unpriced, presents another major challenge. In the case of financial services or
government records or services, substantial government cooperation may be required,
raising political and bureaucratic hurdles. In some ways, of course, the essence of the
success of the rural IT-based-service business model depends on the selection, quality
and pricing of the services being offered. What is interesting is that a substantial amount
of learning has occurred in this arena, in just a few years.
The final stage of the value chain in Figure 2 refers to human resource
management (HRM) and customer relationship management (CRM). In this context,
these more general terms take on specific focuses. Training of rural kiosk operators,
whether they are formal franchisees or independent farmer operators, becomes a key
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
aspect of the delivery model. Training the field personnel at various levels (village and
district hub) is also critical. Gathering customer information on usage patterns (nature
and timing of use), revenue streams, responsiveness to pricing, social acceptance, and so
on is also vital, as these are brand new markets in terms of the nature of service delivery.
Furthermore, being able to respond to this information with appropriate and timely
changes in strategy is also necessary for successful implementation.
One might expect that a ‘labor surplus’ developing economy such as India’s
would not have a problem with the more labor-intensive tasks at either end of the value
chain as it has been mapped in Figure 2. However, it seems that these value chain
activities are the most difficult to carry out successfully, because those with the requisite
skills are more likely to be taken up by more traditional corporate organizations, in urban
environments. This does not minimize the challenges associated with technical
implementations and adaptations for rural areas, whether in software, hardware and
maintenance. However, solutions in these cases are often one-time and replicable,
whereas building organizational expertise involves much more of a situation-specific or
local approach.
We have so far provided a general and abstract discussion of the various aspects
of supply and demand of rural IT-based services. In the next section, this discussion is
made more concrete and specific, through an assessment of several initiatives in India.
4. Implementation: Cases, Impacts and Lessons
The discussion of several rural-IT initiatives is based on field visits conducted
over a two-year period, from December 2001 to December 2003, as well as discussions
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
with various members of each organization.5 The goal is not to provide an exhaustive
description or analysis of any single organizational effort, but to use the conceptual
framework of the previous section to bring out common features as well as differences.
Nevertheless, it is useful to describe each initiative separately, rather than organize the
discussion according to value chain components or demand-side factors, as this provides
a better sense of each overall effort.
Drishtee
Drishtee.com had its origins in Gyandoot, a government project in Dhar district of
Madhya Pradesh, in central India. Gyandoot provided an intranet for 33 village
information kiosks, offering a range of mainly e-governance-related services. The most
prominent of these is land record certificates, which are needed by landowners for
transactions such as sale or leasing of land. While Gyandoot was a specific local
initiative, involving heavy support from the District Collector, Drishtee has attempted to
take that model and rapidly replicate it across the country. Currently, Drishtee has over
100 rural Internet kiosks in several states, run by franchisees according to a revenue
sharing arrangement. In Drishtee’s case, a kiosk has, at least initially, just one computer.
The set-up cost is in the range of Rs. 50,000.
Drishtee is a commercial organization, with specific social objectives of targeting
benefits to the rural poor built into its vision and strategy. Drishtee has developed some
software on its own, but also relies on various partners for software development, as well
as, in some cases, other partners for management of district hubs, from which kiosks in a
district are managed. Thus Drishtee’s model involves not only franchising individual
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
kiosks, but also potentially franchising district hubs. Partnering with local district hub
‘channel partners’ allows Drishtee to expand faster without creating a bulky organization,
spreads risks, and also insulates Drishtee from some of the commercial pressures that
might conflict with social objectives. At the same time, it reduces Drishtee’s ability to
monitor and implement the achievement of social objectives. This tension between
commercial success and meeting social objectives is a general challenge for all the rural
IT initiatives examined here. Despite some challenges, Drishtee appears to have built a
capable but lean organization, with learning having been systematized in a manner that
makes it transferable across locations, permitting more effective scaling up.
Electric power and telecom connectivity have posed challenges for Drishtee,
since it is a pure startup, without resources for heavy investments in infrastructure. It uses
standard battery backup for power interruptions, and has relied mainly on dial-up Internet
access, though it is experimenting with Wi-Fi for district-level intranets. In some cases, it
has set up kiosks even without phone connectivity, relying on physical delivery of
information. Software has also been developed that economizes on bandwidth for
information exchange, making the constraint of dial-up access less severe.
As we have noted, the software and hardware for basic kiosk operations are quite
standardized, and their cost has been falling. Drishtee was able to get concessional terms
for using the Windows operating system. Various local language software applications
have been developed, for e-governance, market price information, buying and selling,
and so on.
With the origins in Gyandoot playing a role, simple e-governance, such as making
government forms available and allowing a variety of complaints to be relayed to the
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
district level government, has typically been the lead service in setting up operations in a
new district. In this context, informal partnerships with district level government officials
(both state and local) have been very significant. For example, in Sirsa and Jaipur
districts, Drishtee has been able to act as a significant intermediary for information
exchange between the district government and constituents. It obviously remains limited
in its ability to improve the internal functioning of government. Nevertheless, Drishtee’s
approach can be viewed as achieving the right kind of ‘embedded autonomy’ at the local
level, to use Peter Evans’ term, meaning a societal structure with coherent institutions
that are autonomous, but nevertheless connected through institutionalized channels for
continual negotiation of goals and policies (Evans, 1995, p. 12).
Expanding the range of services has meant tying up with content partners,
particularly organizations such as Agriwatch, which provides a substantial quantity and
range of agricultural information to farmers. Agriwatch is essentially developing into a
large-scale Internet portal for farmers, and Drishtee’s role can be seen as providing lastmile
access to this rich information, through its kiosks. It is difficult to quantify the
benefits of this service, but its popularity with farmers suggests that it is valuable.
Related examples from the cases of ITC and n-Logue will provide a more definite
assessment of these benefits.
Drishtee’s pricing scheme for e-governance services follows a set model. The full
cost of a transaction such as obtaining, filling out and submitting a government form is
estimated, including imputing the value of time spent in travel. The kiosk owner’s fee for
this is then set at about 10 percent of the estimated transaction cost, also taking into
account possible willingness-to-pay considerations in choosing “pricing points” such as
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
Rs. 5, 10 or 20. Assuming that these fees can cover the full cost of the kiosk owner and
Drishtee (which depends largely on generating sufficient volume) the saving in
transaction costs is substantial. The savings in such cases are generated by reductions in
travel and time costs. There may also be benefits in terms of improving the effectiveness
of transactions (e.g., if a complaint through this channel s more likely to be addressed),
but these are harder to quantify.
In the case of other services, such as matching buyers and sellers, or providing
horoscopes or matrimonial advertising, additional services require partners who can
provide software, maintenance, content or other components of the complete service.
Education has played a limited role in Drishtee’s offerings, though kiosk owners have
often used the presence of a computer and peripherals to offer computer training, as well
as other offline services such as printing and games. The benefits in these examples are
reductions in transaction costs for existing transactions, improved quality of successful
matches, and potentially most significant, completion of activities (e.g., training,
entertainment, communications) that would otherwise not take place because of high
transaction costs.
Finally, Drishtee has appeared to learn rapidly with respect to the selection and
training of kiosk owners, and eliciting the preferences of rural Internet kiosk users. This
partly reflects the organization’s own structure and character. As a lean start-up, it seems
to have attracted people who are relatively in tune with rural market environments. The
process has not been painless, and there are still challenges in managing operations that
are spread across several states, but Drishtee’s ability to manage its own human resources
and the end users of its services has grown over time.
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
In sum, Drishtee has emerged as a typical start-up. Without very substantial
financial resources, it has still managed to expand, and it has built an organization with
strong competencies in what may be broadly termed ‘rural IT-based service delivery.’
This judgment holds despite Drishtee’s lack of any clear strength in technology,
applications, partnerships or ability to scale. In all these dimensions, it is ‘good enough,’
but it appears to have built a strong, low-cost organization from scratch, one that may be
well suited to delivering at least some components of the overall service. This
competence is discussed further in the context of Aksh, a former Drishtee partner.
Aksh
Aksh is essentially a fiber optic cable company, with its core competence in
laying and maintaining cable. Its revenue model is driven by the content and data that can
be delivered over this cable. Therefore it has an interest in increasing such content
delivery. While urban areas in India have seen substantial penetration of cable TV,
through a model (now in transition) of largely unregulated local operators, the rural
market remains largely unserved. The bottleneck has been the lack of last mile
infrastructure, since there is a significant percentage of rural households (especially in
richer districts) that can afford cable TV. Aksh, along with other companies such as
Reliance, has received licenses for laying a new fiber optic network in rural areas.
In the case in point, Aksh rapidly laid a large fiber optic network in rural Jaipur
district (excluding the city itself). It initially partnered with Drishtee for the development
and maintenance of kiosks that would act as distribution points for cable TV access, as
well as Internet kiosks. The Drishtee franchise model, interface and services were
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
adopted, but with the brand name of “Gramdoot.” Aksh therefore appeared in the value
chain as the provider of connectivity, with Drishtee handling all the other value chain
stages illustrated in Figure 2. However, this asymmetry between Drishtee and Aksh was
fairly quickly reversed, and now Aksh stands as the main service provider, with Drishtee
reduced to the role of providing software and related services.
There are several reasons for this shift in the business relationship. Most
obviously, Aksh’s far greater size, resources and hardware capabilities give it an
advantage in setting up and maintaining the hardware aspects of the kiosks. The rapid
expansion of kiosks in Jaipur, with over 100 being set up within six months, stretched
Drishtee’s human resources beyond their limits. It was also not feasible to hire and train
large numbers of people for servicing the kiosks. Second, the needs of the cable TV
business, and some degree of competition that emerged with another cable TV provider
in the same district created additional problems of maintenance (e.g., Aksh’s cables were
cut by the competitor) and conflicts in terms of priorities for bringing Internet-based
services online – essentially, Internet services were the tail of the cable TV dog. Finally,
Aksh’s incentive was to control and brand the effort to score points for corporate social
responsibility.
In any case, the model of rural IT-kiosks managed by a large company with
incentives to provide access to large numbers of rural households appears to be scalable
and sustainable. Cable TV over fiber optic networks provides a strong revenue base, and
a range of Internet-based services and content can be provided through partnerships. As
companies such as Drishtee also scale up, they may be more effective in providing the
necessary scale for ongoing management of the kiosks, including training services and
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
customer relationship management. For now, providing software is easier for start-ups in
such cases.
The history of Aksh’s initiative means that the range of services provided in their
kiosks, the revenue model, and pricing structures currently follow the Drishtee model.
Hence the earlier discussion of benefits transfers over to this case. The importance of
cable TV revenues, however, suggests that these kiosks may emphasize a range of
entertainment services more than utility services such as agriculture-related information
or e-governance. It is conceivable, however, that kiosk operators will be able to span the
entire range of services. The bandwidth available will certainly support a full range of
offerings, and the issues will be managerial attention and the perceptions of rural users.
One important implication of greater bandwidth is that video interactions are possible,
and Drishtee and Aksh have been able to test several communication services based on
this. The power of video over text is in increasing the richness of information exchange,
as well as greatly increasing the attractiveness and acceptance of all the services offered
by the kiosks.
n-Logue
While Aksh and Drishtee are mostly active in north India, n-Logue has its origin
and chief presence in the south. It is a for-profit corporation, with majority ownership
residing with a nonprofit organization. The main impetus for n-Logue came from the IIT
Chennai research group headed by professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala. This group has been
responsible for a stream of hardware and software innovations that enable rural IT-based
service delivery, through connectivity and applications.
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
The core innovation at the heart of n-Logue’s operations is a WLL technology,
Cordect, which provides joint wireless Internet and voice connectivity. The kiosk-level
hardware is relatively inexpensive, and adds only marginally to the overall cost of a
kiosk. However, the construction of WLL towers and maintenance of the WLL hub is
relatively costly, and this fixed cost requires a substantial density of kiosks within a
particular radius of the tower. The n-Logue model is designed to achieve this density,
with kiosks generating returns from fairly small user populations (somewhat smaller than
in the case of Drishtee and Aksh). Another constraint on this connectivity model is the
requirement of clear lines of sight, and therefore relatively flat topography. Nevertheless,
large parts of India are still suitable for this implementation. Furthermore, n-Logue has
progressed well beyond being simply a connectivity provider, to delivering a range of
services – these can be adapted to different connectivity technologies. N-Logue is the
second largest organization in this field, supporting over 500 rural-IT kiosks.
The WLL technology does provide several strengths. It overcomes lack of dial-up
connectivity, and provides an extra revenue stream for kiosk operators, through voice
calls. Furthermore, it has greater bandwidth than traditional fixed line dial-up, which
allows a wide range of applications to be delivered. In particular, the IIT Chennai group
has been able to develop video applications that are sufficiently compressed to work
within the constraints of the WLL.
In general, the close links with the IIT Chennai group have given n-Logue access
to a range of software innovations for delivery and implementation of various
applications in the fields of education, health and agriculture. For example, web cams
have been used for remote diagnostics for diseases of people, animals and plants. A
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
considerable amount of local language software has been created quite rapidly and
effectively. The university connection is important, and stands out as a model for other
providers to emulate.
N-Logue has also been able to leverage its university connections to build strong
partnerships across the board. The Tamil Nadu government has been strongly supportive
of n-Logue’s operations in Madurai district, where numerous innovations have been
piloted and showcased. MIT’s Media Lab has also been involved in the initial stages, and
ICICI Bank is piloting various financial services products in kiosks in Madurai. IN
Nellikuppam district, n-Logue has partnered with EID-Parry to improve sugar farmers’
access to information, and reduce their transactions costs in dealing with Parry’s large
sugar factory in the district, through improved tracking and settlements of payments. In
this case, the factory chimney has also served as a base for the tower, and the control hub
is housed in the factory, substantially reducing fixed costs. Parry plans to use those
kiosks that are under its own brand (several dozen in total) to offer processed foods to
farmers.
N-Logue also appears to have developed a very capable organization, and has
expanded beyond Tamil Nadu into other southern states, as well as the west and north of
India. One advantage that emerged in discussions was the relative ease of establishing
organizational capabilities, training kiosk operators, and serving rural communities in the
south relative to the north of India. This reflects higher proportions of the population with
basic education, greater population densities, and, in general, a more structured and stable
civil society. A factor that seemed to emerge in all cases was the greater average success
of women kiosk operators, possibly reflecting the fact that there is greater untapped
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
potential for rural women, given their otherwise more restricted employment
opportunities.
Overall, n-Logue has several strengths compared to Drishtee, in terms of access
technology, software applications and partnerships. Nevertheless, the two organizations
are quite similar in terms of the range of services offered, and their ability to deliver close
to an ‘end-to-end’ solution. Their social goals are more salient than those of Aksh, and
each has achieved a substantial geographic reach and partnership capability. There are
some differences in emphasis in terms of applications, services, and revenue models
(Drishtee relies more on overall revenue sharing, whereas n-Logue charges mainly for
connectivity). In each case, however, there has been a demonstration that rural IT-based
services are commercially feasible, and as a corollary, provide quantifiable economic
benefits. Since estimates of the overall market size suggest that it can support at least
50,000 kiosks (roughly one per 10,000 people), and these two organizations, plus Aksh,
have less than 1,000 kiosks, there appears to be substantial room for further growth.
ITC
ITC stands out as a large Indian corporation serving global markets. Its kiosks are
called e-choupals, and they have several differentiating features. The key distinguishing
factor is that the e-choupals are totally designed to support ITC’s agricultural products
supply chain. This gives them a focus that is not present even in EID-Parry’s kiosks in
Nellikuppam. In addition, the e-choupals are totally owned and set up by ITC, with the
operators not having any investment or risk of their own. Furthermore, e-choupal
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
operators are, because of the focus, always substantial farmers, and therefore always
male. All these features make the e-choupals different from the previous three initiatives.
The e-choupal initiative has involved a clear focus and strong direction from the
head of ITC’s International Business Division. ITC has been able to turn its substantial
organizational and managerial capabilities toward this initiative. Management trainees
are heavily immersed in the e-choupal model as part of their inculcation into ITC’s
workings. There are four kinds of e-choupals, tailored very specifically for four different
products: shrimp, coffee, wheat and soybeans. The first two of these involve large
commercial farmers, and the focus is on creating Internet access to global market
information to guide production and supply decisions. There are a few dozen of these echoupals.
In the case of wheat and soybeans, there are many small farmers, and over
2,000 e-choupals have been set up, in several states of India.
The description here is based on soy-choupals. Wheat-choupals are somewhat
similar, with the final market and products being somewhat different. Soybeans are
pressed to extract oil, which is sold domestically, while the remainder is exported as
animal feed. Thus they are a cash crop, without the regulated market conditions or
subsistence consumption associated with a food grain such as wheat. Soy-choupals are
used as registry points for procurement of soybeans. Actual procurement is done at
factories and warehouse hubs, but the initial logging in is done through the e-choupal,
which provides price information and therefore price certainty. In fact, the e-choupal
price acts as a floor price for procurement – the factory or warehouse price can be higher.
E-choupals also provide access to local market (mandi) prices and global market price
information on soybeans and derivative products, to allow farmers to compare prices.
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
They give access to operational information, developed by ITC experts, pertaining to
cropping, seeds, fertilizer, and so on.
E-choupals are set up by ITC, with solar power backup and VSAT connectivity.
The equipment cost for the e-choupal is borne by ITC, with the selected farmer providing
the location. In addition to the adoption advantages that come from using a farmer with
high social status as the operator, the house should be spacious and sturdy enough to
house all the required equipment, including the VSAT and solar panel on the roof. Echoupal
farmers take an oath to serve the village, and they are trained by ITC. While
there is an important element of social pressure and pride of work, the operators also
receive commissions on soybean shipments booked through the e-choupals. This
provides substantial revenue to the e-choupal operator.
The narrow (at least initial) focus of the e-choupals and the substantial
commitment of financial and human resources by ITC has made rapid expansion
possible, as well as quick acceptance by farmers. The narrow range of applications has
limited software requirements, and operators bear no risk in the ITC model. The longerterm
goal is, however, to use e-choupals and warehouse hubs as sales points for soybean
oil, tractor rentals, and eventually a range of ITC-produced consumer goods.
The initial benefits of the ITC effort include a substantial reduction in transaction
costs, from 8 percent of a transaction, down to 2 percent, approximately. It is estimated
that these gains are shared roughly equally between ITC and individual farmers. Some of
this gain may be at the expense of traditional intermediaries, who operate in mandis, but
much of it comes from genuine efficiency gains, including clearer quality guidelines and
measurement, greater timeliness and reduced waits, quicker payments, and reduced
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
uncertainties. To some extent, traditional intermediaries are co-opted in the new process,
by being hired to perform tasks such as handling payments at ITC’s receiving points.
Clearly the use of information technology is just a part of ITC’s overhaul of its
supply chain, but speedy delivery of complex information pertaining to market conditions
makes IT essential. It might be asked what acts as a check on ITC’s market power in this
process. Clearly, the traditional mandi system, with its accompanying government
regulation and oversight, acts as continuing competition. More significantly, ITC’s
concern with its reputation acts as a disciplining device. Finally, the long term goal of
selling back to farmers as customers also gives ITC an incentive to cultivate relationships
with individual farmers. In fact, farmers view ITC as treating with greater respect and
dignity than is the case in traditional mandi interactions.
It is quite conceivable that the ITC model will not broaden significantly beyond
the two-way flow of agricultural produce from farmers to ITC, and processed foods,
consumer goods and inputs from ITC to farmers, without extending to e-governance,
entertainment, health or education-related services. Instead, other firms may provide
these services in similar locations to ITC e-choupals.
TARAhaat
TARAhaat has evolved in a somewhat unusual manner. It achieved wellpublicized
success with Internet kiosks in Bundelkhand in Uttar Pradesh. These kiosks
were very much along the lines of those implemented by Drishtee and n-Logue, with a
mix of e-governance services, market price information, and so on. TARAhaat’s longrange
plans include a comprehensive portal for rural information services and an
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
extended vision of its ‘TARAkendras’ as community centers. However, in its expansion
into Punjab, at the invitation of the administrator of Bathinda district, its model evolved
quite differently.
While the Bundelkhand model had used VSAT connectivity, this was not
economical for a commercially sustainable expansion. While Punjab is a high-income
state with relatively good infrastructure, the level of telephone connectivity turned out to
be too poor for practical Internet use. Other issues arose with the substantially greater
investment required by TARAkendra operators, since the model assumed that each kiosk
with have three or four computers. Perhaps the greatest problem was in building an
organization for implementation. While TARAhaat is a subsidiary of Development
Alternatives, an established NGO, it is set up as a corporation, with social goals meant to
be enforced through ownership by the nonprofit parent. The expansion of TARAhaat
required building an organization from scratch, and this turned out to be a slow process.
There were also problems with establishing effective partnerships with local and state
government, and TARAhaat has mostly gone it alone.
TARAhaat does have an educational content partner, called TARAgyan. In
association with various partners, TARAgyan is developing local language content and
software for use in TARAkendras. Basic IT education is an important part of
TARAgyan’s actual and potential offerings, but it is not the exclusive focus. In fact, there
has been a substantial diversification into developing materials for English language
instruction, rural marketing, personality development, and so on. This development was
initially very slow, though it may be picking up steam.
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
The constraints faced by TARAhaat pushed its Punjab effort in the direction of
locating in mandi towns rather than villages, and focusing on offering offline education
rather than a full array of IT- and Internet-based services. Thus, the few dozen
TARAkendras in Punjab have emerged as quite distinct from the Internet kiosks of the
other organizations discussed in this paper. It is conceivable that TARAhaat will end up
occupying a very distinct niche in small town India, quite different from a direct impact
on the rural, agricultural part of the country.
Interestingly, Punjab may have been the wrong place to try to create efficiency
improvements in agriculture, since there are relatively strong market and related
institutions for existing crops such as wheat, rice, cotton and sugar cane. Efficiency gains
in Punjab agriculture are more likely to come about through the intervention of the
government to create a new infrastructure to support alternative, higher value-added
crops, or through concerted efforts by large agribusiness firms such as ITC.
5. Conclusions
This paper has briefly surveyed several initiatives to provide IT-based services in
rural India. I have provided a broad overview of the economic impacts of IT, and gone on
to examine demand side and supply side issues of successful implementation. In
particular, I have suggested that there is a broad range of services that can be provided to
a cross-section of rural households, even at relatively low levels of income. This creates
challenges for implementation by posing choices for organizations, but also opportunities
for creating niches. I have also provided a framework in terms of the supply side value
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Information Technology and Rural Development in India – Nirvikar Singh, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
chain, and used this to discuss the implementation of rural IT-based initiatives by several
organizations.
All the organizations discussed in the paper face common issues of
implementation, but differ in terms of how they have been handled. There are differences
in scale, connectivity technologies, services offered, revenue models, organizational
structures, and so on. Clearly, focused efforts with substantial financial and
organizational backing have a good chance of success. However, even startups that have
put together the required competencies and resources through partnerships and slow
organization building appear to have room in this market.
There appears to be enough evidence now that it is commercially feasible to use
IT to deliver services to rural populations either at costs that are lower than previous
delivery methods, or in ways that make it possible to achieve delivery where none was
earlier cost effective or feasible. Initially, the static savings from reductions in transaction
costs may be of the order of a few percent of value added. However, the benefits from
enabling new transactions should be an order of magnitude greater. In the long run,
bringing rich information to the population of rural India, whether in the form of
education, market prices, market opportunities, and more, can only have positive impacts
on the material well being of rural masses.