Rural India
Key statistics for Rural India (Tarun's Note - Thanks to Ashish Sinha)
- Rural India constitutes 69% of India’s population.
- 86% of Rural population earns less than $2 per day (most of Indian BoP households earn $67 per month).
- There are more phones than Radio in Rural India (100million subscriber base).
- Only 0.29 per cent of the male population has reached the graduation level (0.04% for women) and 6.% of the rural males arc educated up to the middle level.
- 70 % of the disabled in India lives in rural areas
- Safe Drinking Water – 67% of rural households in Jharkhand did not have access to safe drinking water;
- More than 90 percent of rural households in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh did not have access to toilets within their premises
- Connectivity – In 2006: 13% in rural India had to travel > 30minutes; 2008: just 2%!
- When it comes to connectivity, Rural Indian BOP segment has grown more than urban in last year
- Nearly 50% of the villages in the country do not have all weather roads, making physical communication to these villages highly expensive.
Do you see opportunities here?
Apart from these fact Rural development has always been the prime focus of our government since independence. All five years plans were focused towards the special benefit of the rural community. Please notice at the time of election all the political leader goes to rural areas and do their campaign.
The government sets a budget and but it is not liquidated completely. The percentage of budget which is used does not go 100% to needed persons.
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Good points Vinod, esp on utilizing the budget completely and more importantly effectively. The government must ensure that people are able to build self sustainable economies and not be in the business of doing business!
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I see a lot of opportunities here
1. A social networking platform - for villagers, and their communities, this platform can run on cheap mobile phones, with no need to type messages; subsidized calling rates - to get latest weather, mandi rates, and calling to dedicated community lines - where people can talk, as if they are in chaupal.
2. I see solar farms - farms where you grow nothing, just solar plates on acres and acres of impotent land, producing vast amounts of energy, feeding the nearest grid, and paying rent to poor farm owners.
3. I see NREGA scheme doing good for roads and local needs of distant places - but corruption is a big problem.
4. I see - cheap, yet effective contraceptives for women in rural parts.
5. I see - why not train the local Jhola-chhap doctors to a basic medicine course and improve the health services; we can't remove them, why not train them.
I see me, becoming a politician some day
4.
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