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Abstract
The Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are being increasingly used by the governments to deliver its services at the locations convenient to the citizens. The rural ICT applications attempt to offer the services of central agencies (like district administration, cooperative union, and state and central government departments) to the citizens at their village door steps. These applications utilize the ICT in offering improved and affordable connectivity and processing solutions. Several Government-Citizen (G-C) e-Government pilot projects have attempted to adopt these technologies to improve the reach, enhance the base, minimize the processing costs, increase transparency, and reduce the cycle times1,2. A large number of rural E-Government applications, developed as pilot projects, were aimed at offering easy access to citizen services and improved processing of government-to-citizen transactions. Some of these have drawn international attention and have won prestigious awards for their innovative approaches. They have demonstrated the power of ICT in rural context and are seen as reference models for future e-government project implementations3,4. Most of these projects have seen developments in the Internet technology and dropping costs of PCs as opportunity to reach remote locations. They used the existing telecom infrastructure and the Internet access through ISPs as inexpensive connectivity solution.