The Role of Information and Communication Technologies in Rural Development in India
Shubham Chatterjee, Asoke Nath · 2015
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are changing every sphere of our lives. Due to tremendous progress in internet technologies, ICT has a big impact on rural areas and rural lives. Especially in agricultural field there is significant role of ICT in rural areas. It is also expected that the ICT led extension systems are going to act as a key agent for farmers to access information and share knowledge. Hence, renewed enthusiasm to use new ICTs for agricultural advisory services led to mushrooming of e-initiative pilots in India. The innovators are experimenting innovative ICT initiatives solely for agricultural information and knowledge delivery. Unlike other sectors, agriculture is a complex sector where most of the ICT initiatives may not function well. It is time to move forward in integrating ICTs and Information and Communication Management (ICM) in agricultural extension. One of the main reasons for the inequitable distribution of economic gains between the urban and the rural population is the gap in access to information. ICT can help to bridge this gap and hence lead to reduction in the level of poverty. Farmers can get access to knowledge to improve their production and even get better price for their produce using variety of ICT systems. In the present paper the authors made a systematic review of the role which ICT can play in the development of rural areas in India.