Vol 4 Issue 2 September 2011 38 HARNESSING POTENTIAL OF ICT TO BENEFIT RURAL INDIA by 1 Dr. Bajrang Singh Rathore 2 Mrs. Garima Singh 1 Lecturer in Public Administration, Govt Dungar College, Bikaner 2 PhD Scholar, Maharaja Ganga Singh University, Bikaner “The Government would implement a comprehensive programme to accelerate e-governance at all levels of the Government to improve efficiency, transparency and accountability at the Government-Citizen Interface.” Hon’ble Prime Minister, 15th August 2002. ‘If a society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.’ So how would India go about saving the 70 per cent of its population that resides in rural areas with no adequate electricity, water supply, or even a sustainable means of income generation – forget exposure to technology? The first step here, perhaps, should be to arm this marginalised majority with information and education, not through the traditional means of teacher-school building mode but via e-Learning. And this is not an impossible dream we are scaling. It is very much an achievable target and India is showing all symptoms of success. It is heartening to see that the Indian e-Learning industry is estimated to grow very rapidly in the coming years. The Indian government has also taken significant steps towards dissemination of information through a number of e-Learning projects, not only for rural students but for the community at large. These projects can be divided into three heads – social development projects to provide informal IT training to the rural illiterate mass, community information services project for people who have minimum knowledge and finally school based curriculum projects imparting computer education to rural students. Internet Penetration in India However, there is still a lot more to be done. Improvement of connectivity is a primary area of concern. With a PC density of 4.94 per 1,000 people and a tele-density of 32 fixed lines per 1,000 people, India needs to increase penetration in terms of PCs and communication lines for any e-Learning project to be successful. The high cost of ownership, which proves a barrier towards proliferation of access devices, needs to be lowered. Due to high tariff levels, the cost of hardware in India is significantly higher as compared to the rest of the world. For instance, a PC in India costs around 24 months of average per- capita income as compared to China’s 4 months and USA’s 12 days. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), which has started preparing a new policy for increasing the penetration of Internet and broadband, however has admitted that much needed to be done and this is because the situation was far from satisfactory in terms of capacity, subscriber base and growth rate of Internet and broadband usage. Current Internet subscriber base is only 0.4 per cent of the population and the growth rate of internet subscribers has become low; the usage of broadband services is on an even smaller scale—a mere 0.02 per cent. The number of internet connection per 100 persons is 58, 11 and 2 for Korea, Malaysia and China, as compared to India’s 0.4 per cent. On the other hand, the world over, Internet has evolved into a platform for free speech that is being accessed by nearly 850 million users.