Shaded by the generous boughs of an ancient neem tree and overlooked by the village temple is the traditional choupal, or meeting-place, of Badamungalaya in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. A few narrow lanes away, in the spartan front room of Rajesh Nagodia, a local farmer, is the e-choupat a desktop computer, with an internet connection and revolutionary implications for Badamungalaya and 4,150 other villages. The upset in India's recent general election was seen as a rebuff from such villages to a ruling party that boasted of "shining" successes. They had passed the countryside by. The e-choupal initiative is an attempt to join the urban India of rapid growth and a world-beating information-technology industry, to the rural one, where 72% of Indians live, many of them in feudal poverty.
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