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The farmers of Brahmanwada, a village in the central Indian state of Maharashtra, use a shared Internet connection, provided by the Indian conglomerate ITC, to check if that day’s crop prices make it worth hauling their goods to market for sale.
Over the past seven years, ITC has installed 6,500 Internet-connected computers in villages across nine Indian states. The program, called e-Choupal, is a rare example of India’s booming IT sector helping people in rural areas. India’s IT services industry grew up serving the West through low-cost outsourcing, and most providers still get at least half of their revenue from the United States alone. Now the industry is starting to look inward—seeing opportunities from closing the digital divide between urban and rural areas to helping thriving businesses keep pace in a domestic economy expanding 9% a year.
IBM does about $1 billion in revenue a year in India. IT adoption there is in its “first generation, maybe 1.5,” says Inder Thurkral, VP of emerging market strategy. Yet with customers like mobile phone company Bharti Airtel, which adds 2 million subscribers a month in India, it’s breaking new ground, doing some of its biggest deployments of middleware technology for quickly adding services to a network. “For them, IT is clearly a way to scale their businesses,” says Thurkral.
At ITC, agribusiness CEO S. Sivakumar hopes to use the e-Choupal network to deliver credit, health care, and education services. This year, it plans to sell vocational courses, such as basic computer skills and retail training. “We’re seeing it as a universal network that connects rural India to the rest of the world,” he says.
India’s IT talent has grudgingly won over the world with its IT prowess. Now it’s poised to do the same closer to home.
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