eChoupal: The Ticker Tape of Agricultural Markets

The paper will highlight how an ICT initiative, eChoupal, played a role in the region of Malwa, intertwined with other socio-political factors. The pressures on the internal state affairs of Madhya Pradesh, and evident international pressures of WTO trade policies shape the agricultural scenario in India. The emergence of eChoupal was the result of defects in the prevailing supply chain. The large-scale adoption of ICTs supports the notion of technological determinism, which has impacted the working of eChoupals' marketing infrastructure. The paper will try to answer how eChoupals fulfilled Green Revolution's primary goals and later increased the rural development activity as farmers marketed and profited from Sharbati wheat. The paper will highlight the severity of problems with the ICT intervention, which enhanced the class struggles in the Malwa Region. The aggravated class conflict was imposed by the Green Revolution and its unequal distribution of benefits across the agro-climatic regions of MP. Recent trends show that ICT initiatives heavily lean on ‘Village Level Entrepreneur’ VLE as a human-to-human ICT interface to make it acceptable to the rural poor. VLE model, a decentralized local approach to address market-based challenges. The paper will ultimately try to answer the question of whether there was an ‘Information Revolution’, and whether the value of information is inherently empowering or disempowering.