The strength of rural demand is one reason why India escaped from the crisis so lightly.
But companies will not be able to satisfy surging urban demand unless rural supplies of water are also properly managed.
More than half of the firm's revenues are derived from selling in rural India, where demand for its products is growing five times faster than in saturated urban markets.
At the same time, as Mr Viljoen's experience shows, grain is increasingly being stored and milled in rural areas, pushing up demand for skilled labour, and raising profits and wages.
He said not only jewelry, but gold bars and coins remain in high demand because in many rural areas banking is less available.
Most of this feeds demand for gold jewellery in rural India, where the only other investment options are bank deposits and land.
The report said the demand for broadband among deep rural residents was not being met and that many continued to experience variable mobile phone reception.
Those affected by the change are rapidly approaching "number capacity" but other rural areas are unlikely to reach that level of demand for another 30 years or more.
Autocar India's Sorabjee, who recently took a Nano for a test drive, expects demand to be split evenly between urban and rural buyers.
There are significant variances between cities, and I think Chanos is underestimating the poor quality of current housing (has he spent a night in local Beijing housing yet?), the pent up demand to upgrade, and the increasing urbanization of rural suburbs.
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In remote and rural provinces, licences may be hard to come by, but demand is so low that it is probably not worth setting up shop.
The situation has been exacerbated by increasing rates of rural to urban migration which have, on the one hand, deprived the rural areas of agricultural labour and, on the other, increased the demand on the limited social services in urban areas.
Now, in parts of rural India, women have a new -- and rather unusual -- demand for matrimony: a toilet.
Thus when it moves on to highlight the costs of extending the grid to these sparsely inhabited rural backwaters, it fails to realize that the same economic forces driving up demand for electricity are also inducing strong urbanization.
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