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The article focuses on Azim Premji, the head of Wipro, an Indian technology company, and India's richest man. Wipro is one of the country's biggest, fastest-growing and most valuable information technology firms. Since 2000, Premji has tripled his firm's profits. Modest and quietly spoken, he seems vaguely embarrassed by his status as India's richest man. Indian politicians seek Premji's counsel. The local press celebrates him as a symbol of India's emerging global competitiveness. But to Indian businessmen, Premji belongs to a pampered and resented elite. Such is the gap between rich and poor in India, and the proximity in which they live, that the information technology (IT) industry's sudden fortunes could be explosive. None of this is lost on the leaders of India's IT boom. Their problem is how to build community relations and spread the wealth created by an industry which is likely to employ no more than four million of the country's one billion inhabitants.

Technology firms have realised that fostering the adoption of information technology in the developing world would not just benefit locals, but is in vendors' best interests as well. Engineers and programmers at American computing giant Hewlett-Packard in India are working on low-cost devices for the three-quarters of Indians who still live in the countryside. Several centres--in India, South Africa, Ghana and Brazil--have already been established. These technologies are part of HP's plans to sell to the four billion poorest people at the bottom of the global economic pyramid. In addition, the company has invested resources in a project designed to set up "Digital Villages" and "i-communities" around the world--the former are philanthropic projects, the latter strategic market investments. Companies around the world are now busy developing low-cost devices and innovative business models to reach the world's poor.