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Journalism of Courage
The new slogan for the infotech marketers seems to be ‘Gaon Chalo’ (let’s go to villages), with a large number of Indian corporates launching cyber campaigns to target rural consumers. Among them are the e-Choupals of ITC. The company has set up over 700 such centres that offer websites in local languages to provide information like good farming practices, weather forecasts and market trends to those in remote villages. These e-Choupals already cover 4,500 villages and about five lakh farmers, while the company has major expansion plans. Likewise, Aksh, an optical fibre cable manufacturer, has introduced Gramdoot, an e-governance and rural convergence initiative that runs through village community kiosks. Even the government has decided to bridge the ‘digital divide’ and take technology benefits to the masses. The prime minister’s National Task Force for IT has recommended that all the PCO/STD booths in the country should be converted into Public Tele Information Centres to provide Internet access to the common people besides basic telephony services. Digital post offices started by the government and private enterprises also aim at providing electronic messaging services to the masses.
But will marketers succeed in wooing the rural buyers to use digital products and services to keep their business operations viable? This seems a challenging task. Especially keeping in view the dismal performance in ushering in a digital era in the country. Since August 15, 1995 — when the Internet was introduced in India — there are an estimated three million connections through over 30 Internet Service Providers (ISPs), against the worldwide Internet subscriber base of 600 million. This means, a country of one billion, that also claims to be an IT superpower, took seven years to give one connection per 300 of its people. Similarly, there’s just one computer per 200 people, and four phone lines per 100 people. So when there’s a limited demand in the urban areas, where consumers have relatively higher purchasing power, how can the demand be created in the countryside?
One way will be to first increase the awareness of the benefits of these services among rural folk. Concept selling needs to precede commercial selling.
This can be achieved by actually demonstrating the technology benefits for day-to-day utility services. For example, low-cost Internet telephony, instant e-messaging, news, education, are some of the applications that could be of immediate interest. For providing such services, information kiosks can be formed that will not only promote digital interfaces but also provide employment to local people. However, the implementation of this system can take time because huge infrastructural costs are involved. It may be difficult for individuals to arrange this money especially in the absence of entrepreneur-friendly finance options through financial institutions.
In the given situation, a possibility could be explored to use the local institutions, like temples and schools, as ‘information shrines’. For attracting private participation for setting up digital information centres, government can even devise a model like VPT (village public telephone), that forces private telecom operators to offer village telephony as part of their contract. Also, big domestic and multinational IT companies that have funds for philanthropic activities could be approached.
While in the initial stages, rural projects may not prove to be profitable for IT companies, experience in other industry segments suggests that there is a mass market that needs to be explored. It has already happened in the case of television. Market estimates suggest that over 65 per cent of colour television sales in the current year are expected to come from rural areas. It is this potential that the cyber marketers have to tap. If a villager can pay for cable TV subscriptions, he can also pay for these computer-based services that promise quality and interactivity.
