American Journal of Rural Development, 2017, Vol. 5, No. 4, 117-120 Available online at http://pubs.sciepub.com/ajrd/5/4/5 ©Science and Education Publishing DOI:10.12691/ajrd-5-4-5 Impact of ICT in Rural Development: Perspective of Developing Countries Jayita Pramanik 1,* , Bijan Sarkar 2 , Shyamalendu Kandar 3 1 Department of Education, Moyna College, Purba Medinipur, West Bengal, India 2 Department of Education, University of Kalyani, West Bengal, India 3 Department of Information Technology, Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur, Howrah, West Bengal, India *Corresponding author: pramanikjayita@gmail.com Abstract Information and communication technology (ICT) can be thought of as an umbrella under which there reside communication system, device and applications. Main importance of ICT is given to its ability to provide greater access to information and communication to the populations and the quality of service provided than the technological backbone required. Rural development includes economic betterment of people as well as greater social transformation to eliminate poverty, ignorance and inequality of opportunities. In developing countries a large number of people are resident of rural area, thus rural development program is a necessary aspect. Use of information and communication technology can contribute a lot in socioeconomic development of rural area. In the current communication we have mainly focused on rural education, agriculture, health care facility, disaster and emergency response and E-governance facility in rural areas of developing countries. Keywords: ICT, rural development, developing country Cite This Article: Jayita Pramanik, Bijan Sarkar, and Shyamalendu Kandar, “Impact of ICT in Rural Development: Perspective of Developing Countries.” American Journal of Rural Development, vol. 5, no. 4 (2017): 117-120. doi: 10.12691/ajrd-5-4-5. 1. Introduction Information and Communication Technology abbreviated as ICT consist of Information technology, enterprise software, audio-visual system, middleware using which user can access, store, transmit and modify information as required. Exponential growth of internet user, invention of modern communication devices, significant development in cloud and grid computing etc. have helped ICT to flourish as an rapid developed technological field in the last decade [1]. Mass use of information and communication technology with proper guidance helps a nation to create information rich society and helps in supporting livelihoods [2]. According to world bank report about 46.147\% of world population are from rural area and for developing countries like India, China, South Africa, Bangladesh, Indonesia the percentage is 67, 44, 35, 66 and 46 respectively. Rural development is a systematic ongoing process of improving the quality of life by socioeconomic well being of the people living in rural areas. In this work we have mainly concentrated on the improvement of education, agricultural process, health care facility, disaster management, tourism (if exist) etc. with the help of Information and communication system and thus contributing towards economical growth and changing quality of life. An analysis has been made by Shalni Gulati on technology enhanced learning in developing nations [3]. Author focuses on education gaps, success and challenges of open and distance learning and recommends the need of a uniform policy to incorporate new inventions related to ICT in primary education infrastructure in rural areas. A detailed discussion on ICT enabled rural education on Indian perspective is discussed in [4]. According to the author a 24 × 7 online learning platform, with tele/videoconferencing among multiple groups of geographically dispersed learners may contribute a lot in rural education. Rahaman et. al. [5] have analyzed the impact of ICT on socio-economic condition of rural areas of Bangladesh and highlighted the drastic growth in use of mobile, computer and internet to rural people. A current research [6] proposed a framework of using ICT for the rural development of South Africa. Authors have examined the known implementation failures of using ICT and proposed a model containing goal determination and plan for sustainability. Some literature review of ICT based rural development model for South Africa are available in [7,8]. China has world largest population and a large percentage of that are inhabitants of rural area. The country has adopted ICT as a catalyst for its rural development and boosting the quality of life. A large scale survey on middle and schools in China [9] reveals that use of ICT is diminishing the gap between urban and rural area. Though the report has suggested to build proper ICT infrastructure to bring more number of people to ICT based education. Growth of rural economy of China with availability of ICT is highlighted in [10] Agriculture is the backbone of the rural economy. Rao [18] proposed a framework for implementing ICT for