PUNE, India, is one of the world’s most techie cities. Wireless internet pumps out across the city, students from its top-ranked universities jam the streets on motorbikes and on graduation vie for jobs at many of the West’s biggest high-tech companies.

The city is a model of the tech-led renaissance of the subconti-nent’s economy - and is also, as chance would have it, home to Tata Motors, the new owner of Jaguar and Land Rover, two of Britain’s most famous car companies.

An hour’s drive away, past encampments of grinding poverty and urban sprawl is a very different world but one that may just be starting to see the benefits of what the government has dubbed “India Shining”.

Standing in an onion field in a village outside Pune, Chandra Kant can check weather reports, get crop spraying information and find out how much onions are fetching at the local market, all on his mobile phone, for 175 rupees (£2.19) a quarter. The service is being offered by Reuters, better known for offering news and financial information to City workers for whom £2 would not cover a run to Starbucks.

Kant is not yet sure about the service, Reuters Market Light, and wants to wait to see how it performs against the local newspapers and television station but Reuters is hoping that, if it can convince enough of India’s 250m farm workers to sign up, all those rupees could add up to a big business.

So far the company has about 250,000 customers in Maharashtra, India’s third-largest state, for its service that provides weather reports over a 50-mile radius and crop prices within a five-hour journey.

The service is part of a trend that has turned the mobile phone into the hottest development tool for the world’s poor.

To date most telecoms providers have concentrated on reaching the affluent in developing nations with products they offer their wealthy western counterparts. CK Prahalad, in his influen-tial book Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, says that the poor in developing markets offer a huge opportunity for companies willing to target them for their mutual benefit.

One early example of the power of technology to reach those customers came from the Norwegian telecoms business Telenor, which joined forces with Grameen, a Bangladeshi organisation that helps the poor with a programme of low-cost and small loans.

They formed a joint venture to offer mobile services aimed at the rural poor and by 2006 Grameenphone had more than 6m subscribers and held a 60% market share in Bangladesh. It is now among Bangladesh’s largest private taxpayers and has created more than 250,000 jobs.

Reuters is not alone in targeting India’s farmers. Tata Consul-tancy, a sister company to Tata Motors, has also begun piloting a mobile phone-based crop-advi-sory service.

Sadly, India’s farming community could use the help. There have been a spate of suicides among over the past decade and, according to the news, 14 killed themselves in a three-day period this month, driven to despair by debts, crop failures and falling commodity prices. Vidarbha, the eastern region of Maharashtra state, has been dubbed “the suicide belt”. Illiteracy remains high among the farming community, blocking people from employment in the new economy, and potentially hampering the growth of Reuters’ service.

But Reuters Market Light’s managing director Amit Mehra believes it is a problem that the service can overcome. “We have anecdotal evidence that farmers who cannot read get their sons or daughters to read the SMS messages to them. And within a year we are hoping to move to a voice-based service.”

Farming remains vital to India’s economy, with about a quarter of the population relying directly on rural incomes. Of India’s 250m farm workers, 50m sell at market and are the company’s primary target. Literacy rates are higher among that group, Mehra believes.

Mobile-phone penetration among the 700m population of rural India is generally put at 6% but Mehra thinks 12% to 18% of his target audience have hand-sets and that number is growing rapidly. In some villages, Mehra said, 30% to 40% already had them and India signed up a record 8.7m subscribers in January alone. There were nearly 251m mobile users in India at the end of last month and the country is set to overtake America very soon.

“There is huge scope,” said Mehra, adding that he is also seeing early evidence that the service is offering big benefits to its subscribers.

“We get anecdotal evidence from our sellers and have examples where people have made as much as £3,500 by getting the right information in time. There’s a customer who gets a message that it will rain, so he deploys less labour. Another got a message that the supply of onions will go down so he held back his crop and made a $350 profit in one month,” he said.

So far, Reuters Market Light has found 70% of its customers are changing their behaviour as a result of the service.

The route to market is filled with middle men for Indian farmers. Crops are sold at a mandi, a market yard regulated by the government. Typically, farmers go through at least one and sometimes three commission agents, who take the crop to traders. Traders may also collude on prices. Now that the farmer has price information, he can negotiate or decide to switch markets.

Prices do vary sharply between markets. Earlier this month oranges in Nagpur might have been selling for 8 to 10 rupees a kilo, in Hyderabad for 10 to 16 rupees and in Delhi for up to 18.

Price information is collected by local market reporters and Reuters has about 45 people covering 50 markets and 11 crops across Maharashtra.

Mehra said: “In the same way a hedge-fund manager gets information in London or New York to make a multi-million pound decision, we are giving information to the farmer for him to make decisions that affect his livelihood.”

So far, Reuters is adding about 170 customers a day through its direct salesforce and promotions with the post office. The media giant hopes to expand into two more states this year and it is also looking at the feasibility of taking the service to China, Latin America and parts of Africa.

“There is a very big market out there,” said Mehra.

THE LARGEST CONTRIBUTOR TO THE ECONOMY

Agriculture is India’s most important economic sector. In the mid1990s, it provided about one-third of the gross domestic product and employed roughly two-thirds of the population. The growth of the industrial and services sectors has recently led to a decline in agriculture’s share of GDP, but it remains the largest single contributor to the Indian economy. The area cultivated has continued to rise and now covers more than half of the country, a proportion that is matched by few other countries in the world. India has 120m farmers and their produce is sold at 7,500 regulated markets by 5m middle men.

Farmers get as little as 25% of the value of the final price of their raw produces against 40%-50% in America and Britain. Buyers pay a premium of up to 20% due to lack of information. Debts, poor weather, uncertainty over new crops and falling groundwater levels have all been blamed for a spate of suicides in the farming community.

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