Poor rural India? It's a richer place
By Anand Giridharadas International Herald Tribune
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2005
HASANGARH, India The chasm between India’s flourishing cities and bleak rural hinterland is narrowing. Spread across 650,000 villages, with an average population of 1,100, rural villagers were long imagined by city dwellers as primitive, impoverished and irrelevant, something to drive past on the way to something else.
That is no longer the case.
A new prosperity is sprouting in rural India, with tens of millions entering the pressure-cooker-and-television-owning class and tens of thousands becoming sippers of Scotch, owners of premium tractors and drivers of multiple sedans.
The opening of this new frontier of consumer demand from 700 million people could tip India’s role in the global economy from seller to buyer, from a vendor of outsourced skills to a source of consumers for the world’s wares. Multinational corporations, from Coca-Cola to Nokia, appear increasingly keen to understand Indian villagers
