The Impact of Information on India’s Societal Transition towards an Information Society

Three decades ago, a farmer in rural India waited for a government extension officer to learn the right time to sow a crop or the price his produce might fetch. Today, that same information arrives on a smartphone in seconds. This single shift captures a much larger story: the movement of an entire nation from a society organised around land and labour to one increasingly organised around information and knowledge. The way people earn, shop, learn, and connect is being rewired by the flow of information, and the consequences reach into both the busiest cities and the most remote villages.

What an information society actually means 🔗

An information society is one in which the creation, distribution, and use of information become the central drivers of economic activity and everyday life. Instead of physical goods or raw labour being the main source of value, knowledge and the technologies that handle it take centre stage. Information becomes a resource that shapes productivity, education methods, social relationships, and even policy.

For India, this transition did not happen overnight. It grew out of the economic liberalisation of the 1990s, the rise of a globally competitive IT industry, and the spread of mobile phones and the internet. Studies on India’s ICT trajectory note that the country, like many developing nations, deliberately treated information technology as a pillar for competing in a globalised economy. The result is a society where access to information increasingly decides who gets ahead and who is left behind.

Consumerism in India: when information feeds aspiration 🔗

One of the most visible effects of easy information access is the growth of a powerful consumer culture, especially in urban areas. When people can see, compare, and order almost any product from a screen, the line between needing something and simply wanting it begins to blur. Advertising, social media, and recommendation algorithms keep aspirations constantly fed.

The urban engine of digital shopping 🔗

The numbers behind this shift are striking. India’s e-commerce and online shopping sectors have been propelled by rising internet access, with hundreds of millions of connections concentrated heavily in urban centres, alongside a smartphone-owning population that continues to climb steadily. The India Brand Equity Foundation reports that as online shopping spread, the share of food in household spending fell while spending on non-food goods rose in both urban and rural areas, a classic sign of a consuming, aspirational economy.

Technology has changed not just what people buy but how they buy. The arrival of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and mobile wallets made transactions almost frictionless, encouraging people to spend more freely across a wider range of goods and services. When paying takes a single tap, the psychological barrier to spending shrinks.

The information that fuels overconsumption 🔗

Easy access to information also brings easy access to credit. Pay-later schemes and instant digital loans, often offered right at the checkout, let consumers commit to expensive purchases without paying upfront. This convenience has a darker edge: it can encourage impulsive buying, the underutilisation of expensive goods, and rising debt, particularly among younger consumers who are most exposed to digital marketing.

There is also an environmental cost. As analyses of globalisation and consumerism in India point out, increased demand intensifies production and waste, contributing to pollution and resource depletion. The same information networks that empower consumers can therefore push society towards patterns of consumption that are difficult to sustain.

Sustainable development: taking ICT to the village 🔗

If consumerism shows the city-facing side of the information society, the use of ICT for sustainable rural development shows a very different and arguably more hopeful side. Here, information technology is treated not as a tool for selling more, but as a means to lift the rural poor out of disadvantage by giving them knowledge they previously had no way to reach.

Swaminathan’s Information Village Research Project 🔗

The clearest Indian example of this philosophy comes from Professor M. S. Swaminathan, often called the architect of India’s Green Revolution. Recognising that the next phase of rural progress required knowledge rather than just seeds and fertiliser, his foundation launched the Information Village Research Project (IVRP) in the late 1990s in Puducherry. The idea grew from a 1992 dialogue on making information technology reach the unreached.

The model was simple but powerful. As documented by the World Bank, information village shops equipped with computers, telephones, and dial-up connectivity were set up across a cluster of villages. Information was downloaded from the internet and converted into locally specific content: daily news, the latest crop and input prices, weather reports, and details of government programmes. Crucially, all of this was provided free of cost, and the project went on to win the Stockholm Challenge Award in 2001.

From information to livelihoods 🔗

What made these Village Knowledge Centres (VKCs) sustainable was the way they were embedded in the community. Early experience showed that centres located in private homes excluded socially disadvantaged people, so they were shifted to public spaces. Groups of village women were trained to manage the computers and deliver weather updates, market prices, and health and agricultural advice to the wider community.

Over time the centres did more than share information. The M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation describes how these knowledge hubs became lifelines for farmers, with internet links supporting small “science franchises” such as mushroom cultivation, dairies, and biopesticide units, often backed by loans to self-help groups. The lesson was that relevant, demand-driven content, not the technology itself, was the real key to success. This approach links directly to sustainable development by improving food security, supporting eco-friendly livelihoods, and reducing the information gap that keeps rural communities poor.

Towards an information society: India’s gradual transformation 🔗

The threads of consumerism and rural empowerment come together in India’s broader, ongoing transformation into a full information society. This is no longer the work of isolated pilot projects but a stated national goal.

Digital India and the knowledge economy 🔗

The clearest expression of this ambition is the Digital India programme, launched in 2015 and led by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. Its official vision is to transform the country into a digitally empowered society and a knowledge economy, built around high-speed internet as a core utility, digital identity, and digital literacy. The programme explicitly treats ICTs as tools that can both bridge the digital divide and contribute to growth in the economy, employment, and productivity.

The economic implications are substantial. India’s digital economy has grown to rank among the largest in the world, and projections cited by IBEF suggest it could contribute close to a fifth of national GDP by the end of the decade, supported by explosive growth in UPI transactions. Alongside the economy, the socio-cultural fabric is changing too: services from banking to healthcare to education are increasingly delivered online, and Indian-language digital content is helping more people participate.

The digital divide as a fault line 🔗

This transformation is far from complete or even. The single biggest obstacle is the digital divide, the gap between those who can access and use information technology and those who cannot. Research published through academic work on the information society in the Global South stresses that genuine transformation depends not just on installing infrastructure but on designing it around real social, economic, and cultural contexts.

In India this divide runs along several lines: urban versus rural, rich versus poor, and even language versus language. While mobile data is among the cheapest in the world, the cost of devices remains a barrier for many low-income families, and digital literacy is uneven. If left unaddressed, an information divide can harden into deeper economic and social divides, becoming a potential source of tension rather than a tool for equality. This is precisely why initiatives that combine technology with local empowerment, in the spirit of the Village Knowledge Centres, remain so important to India’s path forward.

A society reshaped on two fronts 🔗

Taken together, these forces show that information is reshaping India on two fronts at once. In cities it accelerates consumption, convenience, and aspiration, with all the economic energy and environmental risk that brings. In villages, when guided wisely, it can deliver knowledge that improves livelihoods and supports sustainable growth. The outcome of the transition depends largely on whether the country can extend the empowering benefits of information to everyone while managing its excesses. India is not simply adopting new technology; it is renegotiating the relationship between knowledge, opportunity, and daily life for more than a billion people.

What do you think? Does easier access to information ultimately empower ordinary people more than it pushes them towards overconsumption, or is the balance tilting the wrong way? And if you were designing a Village Knowledge Centre for your own region today, what local information would you make sure it provided first?

References

1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272458961_India's_Perspective_of_Information_and_Communication_Technologies_ICTs_for_Social_Development
2. https://www.ibef.org/blogs/decoding-the-indian-consumer-basket
3. https://iaspoint.com/globalisation-and-consumerism-in-india/
4. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/107871468040601362/pdf/514570WP0IN0MS10Box342028B01PUBLIC1.pdf
5. https://www.mssrf.org/our-stories/village-knowledge-centres-as-lifeline-for-local-famers
6. https://digitalindia.gov.in/content/vision-and-vision-areas
7. https://www.ibef.org/government-schemes/digital-india
8. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-287-381-1_1