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BT DOTCOM: COVER STORY Backcountry Business Dotcoms that target the village allow locals to connect to the markets beyond. Their business models vary substantially from their urban cousins, but the aim is the same: to make money. By T.R. Vivek & Samar Halarnkar
Bundelkhand is one of those vast, seemingly hopeless parts of unseen India. Sprawling across 12 Madhya Pradesh districts and five Uttar Pradesh ones, it carries whispers of sati, tales of dacoits, and scars of innumerable droughts. Its people are among India's poorest and most illiterate. And the women here are treated worse than their sisters elsewhere in the country. It isn't a place where you will hear much talk of the new century. It is surprising then to hear Preeti Parmar, 21, and her sister Rajmani Parmar, 23, talk about job opportunities for women, the net-and sustainable business models. Here in the dusty, interior village of Punavali Kalan, on a barren hillock overlooking the village of 4,000, is the home of the Parmars, traditional landlords. The house doubles up as an internet-driven information centre, just one of seven that have sprung up in Bundelkhand this year. The sisters Parmar (Rajmani is an ma in Sociology; Preeti is an arts graduate) would normally be married, even mothers. But they held off and when the net came along, they jumped at the opportunity. The sisters got their family to cough up Rs 15,000 as an initial investment. The centre now provides them with a steady income of Rs 3,000 a month, mostly from offline it courses (the net connection has been down the last month). Centres like these are franchisees for tarahaat.com, a website that just won the prestigious Stockholm Challenge Award, the Nobel for organisations that use it to create economic and social change. It won the award jointly with another organisation at the other end of the country, the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, which is similarly aiding the spread of wired entrepreneurship in the villages of Pondicherry. With dotcoms dying, and VCs balking at mention of the term, altruism is out. The structure of these rural dotcoms might be substantially different from their urban counterparts, but the aim is the same: to make money. So the Parmar sisters are vital cogs in tarahaat's fledgling efforts-a similar project is running in Bhatinda, Punjab-to build sustainable rural business models. The investment in the project since its inception 12 months ago has been nearly Rs 3.5 crore, mostly from NRI investors, Excelsior Venture Management, and the money the parent organisation, NGO Development Alternatives (DA), gets from rural consultancy work done for international aid agencies. "It's been very tough to convince VCs to part with money after the dotcom bust,'' rues Dr Ashok Khosla, a Harvard-trained nuclear physicist who runs DA. But he says tarahaat should break even by 2005, as the centres expand into mining data on rural consumers, and facilitating e-commerce for farmers. With a sizeable number of farmers flocking to its centres, the site could offer seed, fertiliser, and farm-equipment companies with easy access to rural markets. Companies can in turn display details on the site and sell to groups of farmers at discounted rates. "The software for all these features is with us and the content too should be ready in the next few months," says Dr Khosla. Making money off the Patwari It's a model that has as good a chance at success as any. In another corner of MP, a government-sponsored project called Gyandoot, shows the way. Gyandoot, which won the Stockholm award in 2000, connects 21 village intranet or internet kiosks-each serving between 20 to 30 villages-with the district headquarters, Dhar. In all, about half a million people in Dhar-a soya bean and cotton belt handling nearly Rs 400 crore ($90 million) of agricultural commodities-can now access various government services. But the biggest attraction is the market prices offered by soochanalays. Gyandoot has proved that villagers are willing to pay if they can eliminate the great Indian wait for land records and caste certificates-prerequisites for a variety of cut-rate loans, subsidies and other concessions. The avarice of the record-keepers, the patwaris, is legendary. The going rate for a copy of a land record is Rs 500. Today villagers who can access a soochanalay routinely get copies of land records, bank loan forms and maps online instead of bribing the patwari. All local banks in Dhar now accept printouts of land records from soochanalays. When Gyandoot first got off the ground in January 2000, it was largely ignored by farmers. "We just sat around the first few weeks," says Nand Lal, 23, a young man who runs one such busy soochanalay. Now, Lal says, after they realise how it eliminates middlemen, solves problems and boosts incomes, for nominal payments, it is not uncommon to see lines outside kiosks on some days. Outside Lal's kiosk, potato farmer Ram Singh, chews paan as he waits to find out today's price in the mandi at Indore, an hour away. Till last year, he sold his potatoes to local middlemen at Rs 300 a quintal. Through the soochanalay he found he was getting between 30 to 40 per cent of the market price. Now he routinely hires a tractor for Rs 50 and chugs along to the Indore mandi. To pay Rs 20 for an inquiry is far better than relying on traders who are known to quote rates far below the market price and pocket the difference. It is from a growing number of jobs such as these that the soochanalays thrive. The Village Steps In The great thing about Gyaandoot is that the centres are not run by the government, but by local youth for whom it is a business proposition. Soochanalay operators get a bank loan of about Rs 75,000 to buy the computer, modem, printer, and the all-important ups, while the local panchayat covers the cost of the phone and electricity connections. Each kiosk generates about Rs 30,000 per year. The operators retain 90 per cent of the fees they earn, while a 10 per cent commission is passed back to the panchayat to pay for the development of more services and expand the system. The soochanalay operators have continually discovered new avenues of revenue. Panchayats are handing over their water taxation billing to them. Deepak Lal, 19, who runs the soochanalay at Bagdi village prepares and sells copies of the voters list to prospective candidates for the panchayat elections. He's also started training six students in computer operations. At nearby Gunawad village, private schools get their report cards typed and question papers set at the local soochanalay. But the challenges are still severe: from being dependent on the government to keep services like market information going to endemic power cuts. In Bundelkhand, the Parmar sisters manage to survive power problems because of the generator DA has given them. That clearly isn't sustainable. And if the generator breaks down, there's no mechanic in these parts. But the sisters are learning. "We know the tricks to set the genset right when it breaks down," says Preeti with a smile. Like every net entrepreneur, the nimbleness comes quick. |
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