A review of IT initiatives in rural India

Empowerment may be at the individual, organizational or up to the whole of country level. This paper examines ICT initiatives as an empowerment enabler in rural India. One rural eHealth empowerment initiative is the Karnataka Internet Assisted Diagnosis of Retinopathy of Prematurity (KIDROP). An example of an eGovernance initiative is Bhoomi, while the rollout of computers will enable not only eGovernance but eEducation as well. Facilitating such schemes is the use of Solar Minigrids as a means of strategically adding to the electrical power supply, as a means of overcoming electricity shortages, which is even more of a problem in rural areas than it also happens to be in the urban centres of India. This paper not only explores these technological empowerment initiatives, but examines parameters aiding and hindering such stratagems, including issues surrounding resistance to change, gender role expectations in communities and lack of basic infrastructure.