Study of the rural entertainment industry with information and communications technology as the enabler

Abstract

Rural India has potential. People are brand and value-conscious, and distribution and reach is the biggest problem. Rural areas have money for entertainment spending. Three authors form the core of our arguments. We utilize Amartya Sen’s argument that a community voice will lead to accelerated progress through increased freedom. Castells speaks of the existence of a Network Society today. Prahalad speaks of how profit motives of corporations today can be piggy-backed upon for rural development. The HP iCommunity is an excellent example of how cheap rural communication networks may be built to benefit the public at large. Of special interest are their distributed networked Community Information Centres (CICs) for providing crop information in both English and the vernacular, and their mobile soil testing and health education laboratories. Prahalad speaks of shrinking the curve to speed up communication. We propose methods to bridge this communication divide using a shortened development curve. Amartya Sen insists that freedom of speech is an integral element to progress, and the idea of a Community Voice is one way to develop this medium. Here, volunteers would collect opinions, writings and statements from the “lowest” levels of the economic ladder, and collate them into self-running and independent websites or newsletters that voice these opinions. As opposed to the elite media of today, this would be a far more accurate representation of rural reality and thus lend a voice to calls for improvement and empowerment. The goal of an ICT related project is to enable two way communications between parties. The Internet has made the nouveau rich a voice to reckon with; similarlytelevision and community voices can consolidate rural voices. The physical infrastructure and bandwidth exists in India today through a combination of BSNL and the Indian Railways – the answer lies in using this infrastructure as a means to enabling rural voices and thus creating structured channels to address them.