Window to villages

A 27-volume survey tells you all you need to know about rural India

With over 72 per cent of the Indian population living in 638,588 villages, nobody can undermine the importance of rural India.

But rural India is also a space of constant flux, and is often ignored by mainstream media. All these make the Survey of Rural India by Gyan Publication a timely document.

It compiles information under 175 rubrics about each Community Development Block in the country. Administration, literacy, sources of irrigation, age-wise data, languages, disabled population are only a few of these rubrics.

Spanning 27 volumes, the survey is of immense help to all researchers, writers, scholars, administrators, planners, tourists, librarians and everyone else who wants to know about rural India closely.

The complete set costs Rs.90,000. The sheer heft of the survey reflects the size and significance of rural India.

The survey has been authored by N. Seshagiri. A doctorate in computers and telecom from the Indian Institute of Science in 1964, he founded the National Informatics Centre (NIC) in 1975 and was its director-general till 2000. Under his initiative, NIC developed over 6,000 databases and associated software packages including several nagar palika and rural databases.

He was felicitated with the Padma Bhushan in 2005.