The rural connect

: Information and entertainment-starved Indian farmers have a new suitor at their door. No, it’s not just a bevy of television makers and direct-to-home service providers beating a rural path, but content creators such as Thomson Reuters and cellphone maker Nokia, who have sniffed a big opportunity here. Growing rural incomes, coupled with rising mobile penetration, make for a robust business case for delivering local, usable content cheaply over the mobile—anything from weather updates, farming tips, mandi prices to English language tutorials.

Though most ‘rural content’ initiatives have yet to scale up substantially, what gives strength to the model is the sheer heft of the rural opportunity—six lakh-odd villages, 144 million households, 730 million people and a market worth over Rs 14 lakh-crore! There are over 141.68 million mobile users in rural India, though penetration (at 17.22 wireless teledensity) still lags behind urban areas (94.98 wireless teledensity), as per latest figures...