Development: Wiring the Villages

In 1997, satellite TV came to the Warana sugarcane-growing region of Maharashtra state, some 250 miles southeast of Bombay, and the ground started moving under the farming village of Pokhale. "Even one-year-olds started shaking their hips like those MTV girls," says farmer Shantappa Ghewari. More than a year later, another magical box was installed in the village, and Pokhale became one of 70 villages in the region to take part in the "Wired Village Warana," a $600,000 information-technology project initiated by the federal government. All the villages in the area have computer kiosks that are linked to a central network, and...

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