The Indian Institute of Management and the World Bank organized a workshop titled "Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for Rural Development" to bring together case studies of various applications of ICT that can make a difference in the delivery of services or products in rural areas. The cases presented illustrate the opportunities and challenges in the diffusion of ICT within India and fother developing countries. ICT applications can be classified as those that provided decision support to public administrators for improving planning and monitoring of developmental programs, those that improved services to citizens and brought in transparency, and those that empowered citizens through access to information and knowledge. This paper presents successful examples of ICT rural development projects.
8 pages., Via online journal, This paper examines the effect of farmers' access to communication technologies (CTs) on farmers' agricultural output at the aggregate level in the People's Republic of China (P.R. China) based on panel data. The paper uses a dynamic Cobb–Douglas aggregate production function and the generalized method of moments (GMM) as estimation techniques to estimate the parameters of interests. The research findings are: the estimated effects (measured by elasticity) of teledensity on the provincial level agricultural output have been positive and statistically significant both in the short and long runs. In the long-run, the size of the effect is substantial: from 0.94 to 1.06. This implies that the agriculture sector of the P. R. China has some potentials to derive benefit from the use of CTs like telephone. Hence, the Chinese government should consider policy support to expand communication infrastructure for the farmers
