Exploring Feasibility of Alternate Channels of Information Dissemination: Study of Rural Consumers Information Needs

Information plays a vital role in lives of individuals/groups for development and growth. Just information does not serve the purpose, but accurate information does. The sources/tools/techniques used to get the desired information have evolved from the foremost person-to-person interaction to the latest search engines on the World Wide Web. Thus options to obtain information have widened. Search engines have enabled to get information from any corner of the world to person’s desktop within fraction of seconds. In this paper, we try to study the information needs of rural population in India. This research tries to understand types of information required and frequency of search for information among the rural population. The study attempts to understand whether, demand exists for ‘information on demand’ or search engine service itself would unlock a new untapped demand. The socio-economic aspect, livelihoods of rural population and the available resources for information retrieval have been studied to enable, if search engine service could be made available to them and in what form. Whether this proposition of search engine services being made available to those who are unable to access or rural population would be a win-win scenario for the users as well as for the search engine service providers (considering the limiting factors). The paper ends, with possible alternatives to make search engine services available to those unable to access and at the same time can be attractive to the search engine service providers.