ITC Limited has won the "Enterprise Business Transformation Award" for Asia Pacific (Apac), instituted by Infosys Technologies and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

ITC has won the award for its trail-blazing 'e-Choupal' initiative, launched, implemented and scaled up to cover a significant part of rural India by the Company's agri business operations.

The winners from Apac were announced at Shanghai today and would be formally recognised on June 5, 2004 at the Wharton global forum in that city. These awards recognise visionaries and organisations that use technology creatively to revolutionise their industries.

ITC's trend-setting 'e-Choupal' project is the largest corporate Information Technology (IT) - based intervention in rural India. 'e-Choupal' brings the power of expert knowledge to the smallest individual farmer, leveraging the power of the Internet.

'e-Choupal' enables the farmer to readily access crop-specific real-time information and customised knowledge in his own native language. It thus improves the farmer's decision-making ability, thereby helping him to better align his farm output to the projected demand in Indian and international markets. The farmer's ready and easy access to expert knowledge helps significantly improve the quality of his crop and the productivity of his land, thereby fetching him much better returns.

The 'e-Choupal' network also helps aggregate demand in the nature of a virtual producers' co-operative, in the process facilitating the farmer's access to higher quality farm inputs at lower costs. 'e-Choupal' also creates a direct marketing channel, eliminating wasteful intermediation and multiple handling, thus reducing transaction costs and improving logistical efficiency.

The 'e-Choupal' initiative is bringing about a revolutionary transformation in Indian agriculture. 'e-Choupal' is already helping improve the competitiveness of 2.4 million farmers through over 4,100 e-Choupal installations covering 21, 000 villages in 6 states. Over the next decade, the e-Choupal network will cover over 100,000 villages, representing 1/6th of rural India, and create more than 10 million e-farmers.

According to Mr S Sivakumar, Chief Executive, ITC's Agri Businesses, "e-Choupal is a telling demonstration of how technology can powerfully transform business. We in ITC are all the more delighted because e-Choupal is perceptibly enhancing the quality of life in rural India."