International Journal of Rural Management

Digital assets (DAs) are growing to be one of the most promising utilities due to the emerging digital transformation opportunities for society to harness. The innovations in contemporary DAs have led to the use of mobile computing, internet of things, edge computing and services like software as a service, platform as a service and desktop as a service. DAs have the potential to leverage and support other assets defined by the International Fund for Agricultural Development to enhance livelihood prospects in rural areas. The E-government services, aimed at mitigating digital divides and enhancing rural–urban continuum, need appropriate DAs. The UN has been conducting periodical E-government readiness assessments with a focus on Local Online Services Index (LOSI). All the countries participating in this readiness exercise are creating and upgrading through their E-government policies. LOSI is largely dependent on the availability of desired DAs, supply of digital transformation-based services and an emerging demand. The LOSI, introduced in 2018, is currently limited to the municipalities, providing a scope to assess rural areas where digital divides are still prevalent. This article presents a framework to discuss the associated DAs to develop LOSI for the rural areas in the Indian context. The article also presents a use case in the Indian context to understand how the Indian E-government efforts are poised to leverage the DAs to deepen rural digital services. Through the use cases, it is observed that the rural DAs need converged effort of policymakers to have a better LOSI.

The Virtual Tutorial Project (VTP) is an e-learning portal, under the Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan. Its purpose is to create an online tutorial using a digital platform based on a syllabus and problem-solving content for undergraduate students in bilingual mode (Odia and English). VTP facilitates the availability of digital content to underprivileged rural students, thereby bridging the digital divide amongst Odisha students across disciplines and universities. In this article, the SERVQUAL model along with Feedback Analysis and Google Analytics is used for the participation of the users of the VTP e-learning platform and to evaluate the users’ satisfaction with the quality of service provided by the platform. That will help in providing suggestions on improvements for better service quality. The user suggested improvements in the quality of the services to enhance user satisfaction with the digital content of the e-learning portal.

Economic institutions play a pivotal role in achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs) among tribal communities. Despite improved access to economic institutions and their services through government and private interventions, a majority of tribals in India continue to face extreme poverty. This study focuses on developing and validating a scale to measure the perceived role performance of economic institutions in tribal societies. Employing Likert’s summated rating scale construction technique, a scale comprising 10 statements related to economic institutions’ roles has been developed. Standardisation through reliability and validity measures, as well as confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), confirms the robustness of the scale. Administered to 270 tribal respondents in Salem, Tiruvannamalai and Viluppuram Districts of Tamil Nadu, our findings unveil diverse roles and challenges faced by economic institutions in tribal societies. The study reveals a nuanced perception among tribal respondents, with a majority indicating a medium to high level of perception. However, a notable proportion demonstrates a low perception level, highlighting areas of concern. The study underscores the importance of targeted strategies to boost financial inclusion and empower tribal communities. It also provides policy recommendations for addressing challenges and fostering sustainable development within tribal societies.

Improving technical efficiency is one of the most effective ways to boost output in any manufacturing process. The efficiency level of enterprises can be improved by identifying their sources of inefficiency. The present article examines the technical efficiency and tries to identify the factors causing technical inefficiency in handloom-based micro-enterprises in Assam. The article used primary data and collected from 312 micro-level handloom enterprises spread across four districts of Assam. The stochastic frontier production with an inefficiency effects model is used for the purpose of analysis. Labour, capital and material inputs are found to be significant and labour is the most effective factor for increasing of output level. The mean technical efficiency of overall enterprises is 0.67 and a wide variation in the level of technical efficiency among the sample handloom enterprises is observed. Inefficiency model shows that a high yarn capital ratio, lower product diversity, entrepreneurs with training, a higher number of employees and adoption of promotional practices tend to reduce the technical inefficiency of the handloom enterprise significantly.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development includes Goal 6 (SDG 6): ‘Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all’. SDG target 6.1 aims to achieve by 2030 ‘universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all’. The Government of India has also launched the Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) to provide potable tap water to every rural household by 2024. In this context, this article explains the findings of a study to assess the domestic water demand and the availability of water in seven villages in the Ballari and Raichur districts in North Karnataka. This study indicates that groundwater is predominantly used for domestic purposes in these districts due to the lack of adequate and reliable surface water. Only 14% of households in the study area receive adequate water as per the JJM norms and this water stress is projected to worsen due to the increasing supply–demand mismatch in the future. The authors recommend the implementation of the revised configuration of the Krishna (Almatti)–Pennar river interlinking project by 2030 since this alignment is optimised to reduce project-related deforestation, people displacement, project duration and costs. This is critical for the sustainable development of North Karnataka.

This article investigates why only some cooperatives succeed. World Cooperative Monitor 2021 reveals that Europe and USA have maximum high-performing cooperatives (based on turnover), while the representation of developing countries in the list of the world’s top cooperatives is meagre. According to the data source of Cooperative Monitor, out of the top 300 coops worldwide, Europe has 159, the USA has 95, the Asia-Pacific region has only 46, and Africa has none. Therefore, this study becomes very pertinent in understanding the performance differences of cooperatives in the Global South vis-à-vis Global North. This study tries to identify the factors that determine the performance of cooperatives operating in both regions. By using Cooperative Monitor’s (2021) data set, the article tries to link the performance of cooperatives with the macro conditions. The democratic condition of a country (macro-level) may influence the performance of institutions at the meso-level (cooperatives). We found that cooperatives in the Global North in countries with higher democratic values have performed better than the cooperatives in the Global South. The study finds that the performance of cooperatives is positively related to democratic values. However, no significant relationship is found between social inclusiveness and the performance of cooperatives.

The contract farming approach, in which smallholders are tied to credit and input suppliers under certain conditions, and can repay the loan with the harvest, is one of the initiatives supporting value chain (VC) development. In this article, we analyse the factors that influence the creditworthiness of rice contract terms for smallholder farmers in Côte d’Ivoire. We use a sample of 134 rice farmers participating in a World Bank inclusive rice VC project in 2021 and apply multivariate probits to analyse factors affecting the creditworthiness of contractual arrangements in the project’s three pilot regions. The results indicate that a range of factors related to the characteristics of the producer, his plot, his environment, as well as the level of trust between the producer and the processing unit significantly affect compliance with the terms of the rice contract. As a result, policymakers supporting the development of the rice VC should initiate hydro-agricultural schemes in the lowlands and reinforce the interventions of extension services and trust between actors in the VC.