The conventional ‘village’ is being digitalized. In the last decade, India has proudly embraced its new image as the world’s Silicon Valley and back-office (and arguably front office) for global business. This momentum is being driven by information and communication technologies (ICTs); subsequently government policies ambitiously live up to this new found reputation by promising digital change across all sectors, particularly in the rural domain (Aggarwal, 2002). After all, India continues to be an agrarian country despite its new found Silicon Valley status. Central to this effort entails connecting India’s 600,000 villages with computers and the net, signaling one of the biggest rural investments for socio-economic mobility. The net is heralded as the new intermediary to knowledge for the villager. Underlying this is the belief that rural poverty has chronically persisted due to information poverty. For instance, farmers are perceived as being poor due to their limited access to critical knowledge on food prices, fertilizers and market demands for agricultural goods; rural healthcare practitioners are looked upon as lagging behind in the latest knowledge on diagnostics and treatment; and rural students are seen as digital non-natives in this virtual and information economy. This paper critically assesses this premise on the information gap being the key barrier to transformative and positive change in villages in India. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in rural Almora in the Central Himalayas,
