Impact of Information Communication Technology in Rural Areas of Uttar Pradesh: Bridging the Divide

Rural India is at a critical stage. It is large in size; problems are aplenty, the challenges are daunting and thus can present a scary picture to an outsider. But if enabled, it has the potential to transform itself quickly. Technologies exist today to provide telephony and Internet in every village. Today ICT applications permeate all human activities i.e. education, health, agriculture, community development, livelihood activities, entrepreneurship development, governance, emergencies to name a few. Inventions across these sectors lead to propriety - social, economic, cultural and political at large – that entails wider ramifications for human development at large. Such developmental promises of ICT encourage us; firstly to elaborate the role knowledge plays in human development; secondly to explore the critical inter-linkages of ICTs with various facets of rural development. Rural Development is seen as a catalyst for their socio-economic transformation. Development applications of ICTs need to understand and build on the patterns of communication behaviour established within target beneficiary communities– offering new opportunities and supplementing communication choices where this is possible and appropriate, but also recognising the behavioural patterns and preferences of the communities within which new opportunities are made available. Successful initiatives in this area need to be “people-” rather than “technologycentred”.