Technologies in Agriculture and Rural Areas

As we celebrate India’s remarkable economic growth of recent years and the rise of the IT and manufacturing sectors we need to consider some sobering statistics: fully one quarter of the world’s poor – almost 300 million – live in India. The IT sector accounts for almost 4 percent of GDP but employs only a million people. About 65 percent of India’s population depends on agriculture for its livelihood. In 2001 about 720 million people of India lived in 600000 villages and 40 percent lived a significant distance from a road. And about 150 million of our countrymen live in slums.