Internet transforms farming in India

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At least once a day in this village of 2,500 people, Ravi Sham Choudhry
turns on the computer in his front room and logs in to the Web site of the
Chicago Board of Trade. He has the dirt of a farmer under his fingernails
and pecks slowly at the keys. But he knows what he wants: the prices for
soybean commodity futures. A drop in prices on the Chicago Board, shown in
red, could augur a drop in prices here, meaning that he and fellow soybean
farmers should sell their crop now. An increase there argues that the
farmers should wait for prices to rise. "If it goes up there, it goes up
here," Choudhry said. The correlation is rough but real. Real, too, is the
link between farmers in rural central India and around the globe, thanks to
a company's innovation.

The concept is the e-choupal, taken from the Hindi word for village square,
or gathering place. The twist is the "e": providing a computer and Internet
connections for farmers to gather around. Choudhry supervises the project
for Tihi and several nearby villages. E-choupal allows the farmers to check
both futures prices across the globe and local prices before going to
market. It gives them access to local weather conditions, soil-testing
techniques and other expert knowledge that will increase their productivity.
Nonprofit organizations have tried similar initiatives but none have
achieved anywhere near the scale that e-choupals have. There are now 1,700
in this state, Madhya Pradesh, and 3,000 total in India. They are serving
18,000 villages, reaching up to 1.8 million farmers. As a result, say those
who have studied the concept, the company behind e-choupals, ITC Ltd., has
done as much as anyone to bridge India's vast digital divide: most of its 1
billion people have no access to the technology that has been developed by
some of their fellow Indians, whether in Bangalore or Silicon Valley.
E-choupals may offer a model for all developing countries.

Source:
http://www.iht.com/articles/123408.html