India and the pain of the last mile: Human-to-human ICT interface for the poor and the marginalized

The third chapter focuses on various efforts to provide access to knowledge to villagers in rural South India by giving access to “the last mile” of telecommunications. In this study, Saji Matthew, Arun Kumar, and Ramesh Subramanian take a critical look at the multifarious efforts to bring Internet access to villagers, and the results that this brings in increased access to health information, to market resources, women’s empowerment and entrepreneurship, as well as democratization. While there have been many studies in this area, the authors of this chapter focus not just on the success stories, but also on the many failures and missteps that have occurred in efforts to provide access to communications infrastructure (and thus the Internet) to rural villages. The authors show, through several case studies, that while enhanced access to communications via mobile telephony has indeed increased access to knowledge, there are also several caveats that hinder progress, or even impede progress on achieving desirable results. Their case studies provide an excellent template that could be used by access providers and policy makers not only in India but also in several other developing economies.