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Among the most remarkable and desirable trends sparked off by the Rural BPO initiative, apart from the direct 40% increase in the village per capita income, is the reverse migration of rural youth back to villages, thanks to the job opportunities created by this initiative. Interestingly, the rural BPO’s have also led to the development of economies around them – shops, cafeterias, movie theaters are examples of the proliferation of economic entities that have come into being to serve the needs of the people employed in the BPO’s. If implemented on a larger scale, this could be a clear solution to the overcrowding of cities which itself is the cause of many other social imbalances in the urban areas.
Drishtee – ICT enabled Entrepreneurship:
Drishtee is a for-profit organisation incorporated in the year 2000 to create and implement a sustainable, scalable platform of entrepreneurship for enabling the development of rural economy and society with the use of Information communication, technology (ICT). Through a tiered franchise and partnership model, Drishtee facilitates the establishment of ICT nodes enabling access to information as well as local services to the rural community at a nominal value. The business model is driven by the village entrepreneur, who owns the village node to operate a self-sustaining, profitable kiosk. The kiosk provides access to information like government records, agricultural data, and health insurance; help in filing of applications for licenses, certificates, compensations, and benefits; commodity product rates in different markets; education like computer courses, and spoken English Programmes. The entrepreneur earns by charging the community a nominal fee for the services provided. Drishtee has a fixed sharing with the Kiosk operator and a variable revenue sharing with the service providers. The Social Return on Investment Analysis shows that for every US$1 of social cost incurred, US$20 of social benefit is generated.
Drishtee has successfully demonstrated this concept in over 1000 kiosks across 6 states in India. Each Kiosk caters to approximately 1200 households, majority of which have an aggregated income of less than $2 a day.
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With a vision to reach out to every village in the country and beyond, Drishtee has set for itself an ambitious target of reaching out to 10,000 villages in the next 2 years.
Kisan Bandhu:
Kisan Bandhu, the brain-child of Professor Vishwanadham, Executive Director for the Centre for Global Logistics and Manufacturing Strategies (GLAMS) at the ISB, also aims at bringing technology into the rural space. It presents a methodology for using mobile technologies and IT enabled services to make rural marketing farmer friendly and rural retailing a reality. The proposal which has received rave reviews in the government circles would be a path breaking venture when implemented.
The central idea is to have a call centre for the farmers where they can call in and obtain information on weather, market prices, seed availability, and any such agri-related information. The proposal also boasts of a robust supply chain system in place that will connect 65% of the population with the rest of the world. Post Offices, public transport, airways, shipping, etc will all be a part of this strong supply chain which will help India maintain a leadership role in using high technology in global supply chain networks.
Thus Kisan Bandhu helps achieve supply chain excellence in both rural and global areas and will help achieve high growth rates in GDP. Rural supply chains emanate from villages with not so sophisticated lifestyles and infrastructure. Hence the implementation of programmes such as Kisan Bandhu which use IT to bridge this gap becomes all the more relevant and necessary.
Conclusion:
What Rural India needs now is an integration of innovative solutions that would start a revolution and take its villages fast forward in time. Simply waiting for the fruits of liberalisation and globalisation to make their way to the rural poor is a short sighted and naïve ideology. It’s high time the key driver of the Indian success story – IT – is leveraged extensively to foster inclusive growth in India and we hope there will be many more such success stories as India continues to grow in the new millennium.
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