Brand conscious: Mangamma earns Rs 1,500 per month selling HLL products

About 70 km to the east of Hyderabad, in the Nalgonda district of Andhra Pradesh, lies Tangadapalli village. Some of its small bylanes are coated with cattle dung. Among the 3,000-odd inhabitants of the village is 27-year-old Mangamma whose house doubles up as a warehouse. Racks of creams, soaps and detergents decorate the house. The reason-Mangamma is among the 30,000 'Shakti entrepreneurs' in the country who stock and sell Hindustan Lever Limited's (HLL) products door-to-door. The wife of the village postmaster, Mangamma sells HLL products worth Rs 12,000-15,000 and earns around Rs 1,500 per month.

Like Mangamma, 30,000 women across tiny villages in rural India sell HLL products as part of HLL's Project Shakti-the FMCG giant's rural distribution initiative, which targets small villages with populations of less than 2,000 people. HLL hopes to have 50,000 such women entrepreneurs by the end of December 2007-a giant leap from just 650 in 2002.

At Tangadapalli, most villagers are daily wage labourers. The average income per household is around Rs 3,000 and savings are minimal. Despite that, Mangamma finds that people are 'brand conscious'. Villagers no longer ask for 'that red soap' but for Lifebuoy. And women prefer the Rs 5 sachet of Fair and Lovely and occasionally even splurge on a Rs 20 Pears soap.

One such buyer is 23-year-old Konduru Balamani. Her husband is a lorry driver and earns about Rs 3,000 (and not all of this is shared). At times, she chips in with her daily wages. Food adds up to her biggest household expense. "We have meat once a week,'' she says, as if to emphasise the good times. And yes, she does pick up Fair and Lovely packets too. And at times, she even opts for a single strand of 16 Clinic-plus shampoo sachets for Rs 16. On an average, she spends around Rs 500 a month on medical expenses, mostly on her two kids.

Expenses on health are high in the village (some suffer because of the fluoride present in groundwater). A visit to N. Yadagiri, a local registered medical practitioner (RMP), shows that people end up with average monthly medical expenses in the region of around Rs 500. It is not, therefore, surprising that Mangamma's ambition is to make her son a doctor. It is also not without good reason that she is focussed on saving her entire earnings of close to Rs 1,500 per month. She, incidentally, also has a bank account and seeing her, others may follow suit!

-E. Kumar Sharma

Getting connected: Mobiles mean farmers don’t have to travel to get information

Until six months ago, 65-year- old Y.C. Anjappa, a marginal silk farmer in the small village of Maadikeri in southern Karnataka, used to spend Rs 20 every week to visit the local market to obtain the rates there. This routine got much more comfortable when he signed on for a Reliance Limited Mobility handset in late 2006. Since then, he has had to pay just 90 paise to call and get the latest information from the market in the town of Chintamani, 5 km away.

Every morning, local salesmen from Reliance outlets in Chintamani head out into the hinterland to pitch for business from farmers and other rural folk, parking their vehicles in the central village square and hawking their service to anyone who is interested in listening. This approach has clearly paid dividends for the company, which has garnered some 100 new subscribers in Maadikeri alone, including the likes of Anjappa, who waited for three years or more to be allotted a landline from state-owned carrier BSNL. Despite being a rustic village of 1,500, dependent on the local dairy (which set a record recently with a Rs 5 lakh monthly collection) and a fledgling sericulture industry, villagers seem acutely aware of the latest and best brands in the market. For instance, in consumer goods, Johnson & Johnson baby powder, Pepsodent toothpaste and ITC Foods' brands top the list, while villagers trade notes on their latest Nokia CDMA handsets (GSM or wireline connectivity is virtually non-existent here).

It's not just technology that's up for sale. Villagers are starting to buy other branded products too. "We used to buy everything from the local weekly market and purchased unbranded goods until very recently. That has changed dramatically following the easy availability of branded biscuits and consumer products locally. We no longer have to visit Chintamani or travel even further to buy them," says T.C Nagaraj, the secretary of the local milk dairy and a long-time resident of the village. Instead, the local stores have moved from stocking an assortment of home-made confectioneries to housing some well-known national and international brands.

Despite the difficulty in reaching villages such as Maadikeri (it's barely 100 km from Bangalore, but the roads are rutted and it takes three hours to get there), companies seem undaunted as they reach out to the furthest corners in search of elusive rural consumers. "We start work at 7 a.m. and don't return until late at night from some of these villages because of the demand that exists there. Initially, they were sceptical, but a combination of BSNL's lethargy and our 30-minute activation routine meant that we were signing up 50-100 subscribers every day," says Sahad Ali Baig, a partner at Saha Infocomm, the local Reliance franchisee. In Maadikeri, locals have begun to open accounts at the Canara Bank branch in Oojipura, 2 km away, and even travel up to Chintamani to deposit some savings. "We earn around Rs. 3,000-5,000 a month and can use some of our savings for mobile phones and other novelties," says one local.

-Rahul Sachitanand

Well stocked: Aadhar outlets have taken the supermarket concept to rural areas

As soon as you enter Mancher town after a four-hour drive from Mumbai, the first impressive building you see is a Godrej Aadhar outlet. 'What's Godrej doing in a small town like this?' is a question that any city slicker is bound to ask. Inside the two-storey outlet, two farmers, Vasant Ganpat Hole (60), and Jijabai Shirolikar (55), are talking to an agriculture officer, who studies a withered plant stalk that Ganpat Hole has got along with him and diagnoses that his potato crop suffers from "late blight". The solution-a fungicide and a crop nutrient-both incidentally, Godrej products. The bill: Rs 420-not chicken feed, but definitely worth a one-time buy for Ganpat Hole, who earns about Rs 40,000 a year from his crops.

The Rs 1,000-crore Godrej Agrovet has 31 such Aadhar outlets in eight states across the country. At outlets like the one in Mancher, farmers can not only shop for agri-inputs, but can get their soil tested for Rs 50. In addition, branded products from LG televisions to gigantic packets of biscuits are also on sale.

A 45-minute drive from Mancher takes you to a small but prosperous village called Ranjani. Some 2,000 people live in this fertile, agrarian village with 350 households. Nearly 250 houses have television sets and most houses have telephone connections. But your mobile connection dies out as soon as you enter the village. It is in this village that Godrej set up its first-ever Aadhar centre. It's a much smaller one compared to the one in Mancher. Farmers buy sickles for Rs 69 or biscuits or shampoo sachets from the groceries section. "Earlier, we had to go all the way to Narayangaon, which is 14 km away, to pick up groceries," says M.G. Ranjanikar (67), who buys groceries worth Rs 500 every month.

A mile away, an annual event is in progress. Farmers whoop and scream egging their bulls as they charge down a dusty 400-metre track. About 25,000 farmers from villages across the district have gathered to witness the race. Nearly 500 bulls participate-many have been purchased just for this occasion and some cost up to Rs 70,000. That's an indication of the purchasing power that some of these farmers have. What's more, the bulls are insured. Any farmer whose bull is maimed in the race is compensated up to Rs 50,000 on the spot.

-T.V. Mahalingam

Nothing big here: Branded products come in small sizes in Kiliamma's village

Singaperumalkoil, a sec c town as media planners might call it, is an hour's drive from Chennai. About 2 km away from this temple town, which gets regular tourist traffic, is a small village called Ambedkar Nagar. Visitors to Ambedkar Nagar, a couple of years ago, would have seen farmers tilling rice fields and cattle grazing languidly. However, over the last four years, most of the villagers have sold their land to Mahindra City (first private SEZ in the country). The villagers now make their living by doing odd jobs-from doing construction work to working as security personnel in the SEZ. The average monthly household income in the village is Rs 3,000-4,000.

A small shop run by a 58-year-old widow, M. Kiliamma, sells soaps, ghutkas, shampoos, pickles, curry masalas, toothpastes, a few vegetables and other items of daily use. A slightly larger shop near the panchayat office stores rice, groceries and branded products like mineral water, Coke and Pepsi. But the predominant packaging for branded goods is the daily 'takeaway pricing'-anywhere from 50 paise to Rs 5.

Kiliamma's son Veerabhadran works as a security staff in Infosys (located in Mahindra City, virtually in their backyard.) He prefers to do whatever shopping he has to do in the city. "Even the watches that are sold here are of poor quality,'' he points out, though these are available from Rs 100 onwards. Major expenses revolve around groceries-rice, vegetables and oil. The remaining goes into cosmetics.

Branded purchases are restricted to ghutkas, soaps, black and white TVs, the occasional motorbike or moped, and cell phones with Reliance CDMA connections. Not all homes have cell phones or motorbikes. Nobody has a fridge. Even the soaps are largely local brands like Urvasi. Thanks to heavy regional television advertising, kitchen products like Rani curry masala and Achi curry masala are much sought after.

-Nitya Varadarajan