Generally it is perceived that IT kiosks in the rural areas would be used for gathering price intelligence or land records and such other aspects of rural life. By using a new software tool developed by Microsoft, it has been studied in a pilot survey of rural usage in Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh that Information Technology has more uses than agri-business fror rural users.
In Maharashtra, for instance, agri-business usage accounts for a mere two per cent of the total usage. They use nearly a quarter of the total time (23 per cent) for reading newspapers online. Microsoft’s software computer-logging tool, `VibeLog’ has been designed to check on the various kinds of usage rural kiosks are being put to.It can measure the number of persons accessing these kiosks and duration of use, Internet sites visited, e-mail clients in a day and the number of distinct e-mail ids logged on.
