Preaching the Internet in a Place of Skeptics

TARADAND, India — Babulal Singh Neti was sitting with his uncle one recent afternoon, trying to persuade him of the merits of the internet.

It was 40 degrees Celsius outside, and the sun was beating down on the withered croplands. His uncle said he had no use for the internet, since he had never learned to read; furthermore, he wanted to nap.

Mr. Neti, 38, pressed on, suggesting that he could demonstrate the internet’s potential by Googling the history of the Gond tribe, to which they both belonged. Since acquiring a smartphone, Mr. Neti couldn’t stop Googling things: the gods, Hindu and tribal; the relative merits of the Yadav caste and the Gonds; the real story of how the earth was made.

Access to this knowledge so elated him that he decided to give up farming for good, taking a job with a nongovernmental organization whose goals include helping villagers produce and call up online content in their native languages. When he encountered internet skeptics, he tried to impress them by looking up something they really cared about — like Gond history.

His uncle responded with halfclosed eyes. “What does it mean, Google?” his uncle said. “Is it a bird?”

While India produces some of the world’s best coders and computer engineers, vast multitudes of its people are like Mr. Neti’s neighbors, entering the virtual world with little sense of how it could be of use to them.

The arrival of the internet in their lives is one of India’s most hopeful narratives.

India’s government has done very little to connect Taradand, in central India, to the outside world: The first paved road appeared in 2006. There has never been a single telephone landline. Only half the houses have electricity.

By comparison, India’s telecoms