His firm has invested in RelayRides and other start-ups that stretch the definition of clean tech investing. They include the Climate Corporation, for extreme weather insurance; Clean Power Finance, which runs an online marketplace for financing residential solar panels; and Transphorm, which makes tools that reduce power loss when electricity is converted in data centers or industrial motors.

“It’s tech companies that are applying their technology to this industry,” Mr. Maris said. “Those are the kinds of companies we tend to really understand and like.”

At first glance, companies like the Climate Corporation, which insures rural farmers, seem to have nothing to do with either technology or climate change. But David Friedberg, a Google veteran who is the company’s co-founder and chief executive, said its goal was “to help all the world’s business adapt to and understand climate change.”

For farmers, that means analyzing “crazy big data,” Mr. Friedberg said, from weather stations, government data feeds, soil moisture models and Doppler radar images. The Climate Corporation simulates the weather for the next two years and runs a Web site where farmers can enter their location and crop, buy insurance coverage and automatically receive payments for bad weather.

Soybean farmers in the Dakotas were recently paid for delayed planting because of an unusually rainy spring, and wheat farmers in Oklahoma and Texas were covered for a intense drought.

I was reminded of the archetypal “bad” food value chain that got much play when there was fire in one of the Swiss road tunnels: potatoes grown in Poland, transported by truck (despite Europe’s vaunted and subsidized railways) to Italy for processing, and then hauled back as French Fries across those same tunnels back to Germany and Poland. It seems common sensical that food that puts on less miles would be better.

So what are such value chains in Sri Lanka? Vegetables from Welimada are transported to Dambulla and then back to the hill country in other trucks. Is value added? Yes. Vegetables with buyers are higher value than vegetables destined for the elephants.

But we could look at the food processing industry which actually changes the lime or chillies. We’ve always been interested in food processing because this is critical (and underused) tool in dampening the wild gyrations of agricultural prices at the Dambulla market. When prices for fresh lime (for example) slips below a threshold at Dambulla, Dialog Tradenet SMSes can inform the agriprocessors who can buy the produce, and give the farmer/seller something more than the nothing he would get under present circumstances.

Shorter value chains would require more marketplaces from which data is collected. More physical market places reducing the distance food travels, but all integrated into one virtual marketplace (more or less) by Dialog Tradenet. With price collection expanding from three locations to seven, this is not blue sky. Concern about the quality of data being supplied by lightly supervised and compensated price collectors can be bracketed for now.

More perilous, however, is the inequality between rural and urban India. Despite several policy initiatives to promote rural penetration, growth in teledensity continues to be skewed in favour of urban India. In fact, the rural population is much worse off than it was a few years ago compared to its urban counterpart.

In March 1998, the difference between urban and rural teledensity was 5.4. In September 2008, the corresponding number had grown to 56.6, which means the divide has worsened almost 12 times in the last 10 years. Since number of fixed phones is declining, the entire change can be attributed to mobile telephony.

THE special cellphone, set on vibrate, begins to whir. Throughout North Carolina, anonymous teenagers are texting questions to it about sex.

“If you take a shower before you have sex, are you less likely to get pregnant?” asks one.

Another: “Does a normal penis have wrinkles?”

A young girl types: “If my BF doesn’t like me to be loud during sex but I can’t help it, what am I supposed to do?”

Within 24 hours, each will receive a cautious, nonjudgmental reply, texted directly to their cellphones, from a nameless, faceless adult at the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign of North Carolina, based in Durham.