What if the Internet came to rural India, and no one cared?

You might call Amir Alexander Hasson, who’s featured in the current issue of FP, an ambitious man. He wants to outfit the two billion people living in rural areas of the developing world with an email address, a phone number, and Web access. To accomplish this monumental task, he founded United Villages, a non-profit organization that is pioneering mobile Wi-Fi stations that can be driven from village to village in developing countries, bringing the bounty of the world wide web with them. They’re already up and running in India, Rwanda, Cambodia, and Paraguay.

You might also expect Hasson to be the first one to cite the dramatic changes that the Internet brings to lives of the poor people who are now wired thanks to his efforts. But in a nice little BBC write-up of Hasson’s work today, Hasson (perhaps unwittingly) points out one of the big contradictions of the “bring the Net and the revolution will follow” thesis:

There’s only 0.003% percent of the web that rural India cares about,” [Hasson] told BBC News.

“They want to know the cricket scores, they want to see the new Aishwarya Rai photos, and they want to hear a sample of the latest Bollywood tunes.”

In other words, rural Indians have the world at their fingertips, and they’re not taking advantage of it. It’s exactly the point that Pankaj Ghemawat addresses in “The World Isn’t Flat.” The world is only a fraction as integrated as we like to think, and Web traffic, economic investment, and phone calls are still far more likely to be local than not. The conventional wisdom says that where the Internet goes, development follows, but what if people just want to get cricket scores?