This might well sound like a surreal world. But it is a real and thriving world, though not much is known about all its diverse facets.

While 2 out of every 3 Indians is a villager, which makes it a community of ONE HUNDRED CRORES, or a BILLION, not much is either written or read about them. It is a given that India started industrialising and urbanising more than a century and a half back, and rapidly, with an unplanned but spontaneously continuing rural out-migration. Yet a good two-thirds of our total national populace are still doggedly adorning our almost half a million villages, though still and unfortunately remaining a largely ignored and consequently neglected lot.

The bitter and indisputable truth is that wealth accumulation is unabashedly concentrated in the urban jungles. Consequently, rural economy constitutes less than one quarter (25%) of our rapidly advancing, and much boasted of, GDP.

A good majority of our intellectual attention is openly focused on the admittedly unplanned but still fast-growing worlds of urbanisation and industrialisation. Research studies and surveys are not sufficiently village-based. Media too is both city-based and city-focused. The social sector facilities, by way of modern healthcare, institutionalised pedagogy, sporting and entertainment centres, etc, are well outside the horizon of the villager.

This awkward balancing between the city-goer and the villager has rendered the student, the teacher, the doctor, even the policy-maker helplessly but woefully ignorant of the diversities, the richness, and yet the backwardness of the rural countryside.

As a group of concerned and aware citizens from different professions, we at the VillageNama have decided to valiantly redress this situation, a situation that is based on intellectual imbalances.