Will the Indian villages login to shop?

What if your maid sends you an email from her hometown? How about village and small town artisans selling their creations to the global cities like New York, London etc? These will no longer remain a distant dream as the Internet is slowly making in-roads into the far-flung villages and remote sections of rural India.

There were questions been put up as to how can rural India gain from the current e-shopping boom? And the answer is simple: through dedicated and collaborative work of the public and private sectors. For a developing country like ours, the government authorities play an essential part along with the private sector for the technological growth of the rural area.

At present, rural India is already advancing towards the Net-age with wi—fi enabled services being introduced at many villages. Initiative in this regard was taken up by a Noida-based company, Drishtee, headed by Satyan Mishra. Seven years back, Drishtee was launched to connect the rural villages of India. As a result, 6000 villages have already been connected till date with a future estimate of touching 10,000 villages by the next 2 years. In 2006-07, a similar project was started by a Massachusetts-based company, United Villages, which brought the concept of DakNet and Kiosks to the backward villages in Orissa. The startling aspect of consumerism, visible in the project was the amount of requests being made by the villagers to learn about e-shopping. These kiosks, transported from village to village to provide the Internet facility, are equipped with a computer, web-cam, wi-fi antenna and other paraphernalia.

According to a report by the National Council of Applied Economics Research (NCAER), rural consumers are more than half of the total consumers in India. Shocking? And more importantly the rural regions are being seen as an important avenue for the essential goods and services market. Therefore, the introduction of e-commerce in rural India is being considered as a vital step.

And lastly, the million dollar question is can e-shopping actually enter in the rural belt of our country? In my opinion, it can enter with the support of government services like Citizen Service Kiosks and portable computers which can be carried to the rural pockets of India and in collaboration with the highly advanced technologies of the West.

Considering the present circumstances, it can surely be said that our quintessential rustic Indian bhaiya is going to get techie very soon!