This Paper has won Third Prize in the CoolAvenues' Paper-writing Competition - "In Search of Excellence" - for the Year 2005.

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Executive Summary

This paper focuses on leveraging electronic commerce for the growth of rural India. Although e-commerce is a relatively recent phenomenon, already it is clear that it will have a profound impact on the world and India. The paper tries to give some facts about rural India and tries to outline some of the initiatives that has been taken both by the government as well as the private parties to increase the popularity of e-commerce and to transfer the benefits to rural India.
It also analyses the bottlenecks which hinders the development of e-commerce in India and tries to suggest some business models that may help for successful transactions. Finally, the paper outlines the steps that has to be taken so that e-commerce will become an integral part of the rural economy so that rural as well as the Indian economy will survive and thrive in future aided by e-commerce.

Introduction: Rural India & E-Commerce

Rural India brings into mind a huge heterogeneous entity which is essentially synonymous with extreme poverty, agricultural laborers who often plough hard in the sun with emaciated bullocks to earn meager incomes that barely makes their ends meet and so on. However, this picture is a distorted caricature of what rural India is today and it effaces the amazing potential that lies within the rural households. The contours of rural India have been changing continuously and at a very faster rate than what many people realize.

Electronic commerce includes every type of business transaction in which the participants (i.e., suppliers, end users, etc.) prepare or transact business or conduct their trade in goods or services electronically. Although e-commerce is a relatively recent phenomenon, already it is clear that it will have a profound impact on life in rural India. Breaking through the tyranny of distance will cause unprecedented changes, opportunities and threats in many key areas like business, employment, and provision of government, banking, education and health services. Whether rural India will thrive or even survive in the future will depend on how successfully they make the unavoidable transition to being part of a new global economy.

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* Contributed by -
Lijo Isac,
MBA (FT), Batch of 2006,
Faculty Of Management Studies,
Delhi University, Delhi.