24 Good Businesses 2012

A window to the villages

Rose Academy is bridging the digital divide by imparting computer  education to rural youth

BHUPINDER SINGH

In Gurgaon, National Highway 8 is not just a road. It is for all practical purposes the line that separates Bharat from India. If you are coming from Delhi, your left hand side could be, for a moment, mistaken for the business centre of any great city in the world – all shiny chrome and reflective glass. On the right, lies what is respectfully called Old Gurgaon, a semi-rural region of unpaved roads occupied by farmers and their livestock.In what is perhaps the definitive indicator of the “non-inclusive” growth of our economy, while the left side is populated by people working for IBM, Oracle and Dell, on the right side, even as late as 2006, there wasn’t a computer academy where people could go and learn the basics of operating this modern necessity.