Clicking on: farmer connect made easier thru e-choupal
What was conceived as an effective supply chain delivery for its agri commodity business soon evolved into a universal platform for rural India for a basket of goods, services and, most critical of all, information access with capabilities to brin...
By J Padmapriya, TNN |
HYDERABAD: ITC’s e-choupal, a universal platform for rural India, is a very successful case study taught at Harvard and Michigan Schools. Management gurus C K Prahlad and Venkat Swami cite the e-choupal example to explain co-creation.
Every other day, an ITC executive is making a presentation on this initiative somewhere in the world. The initiative has won the Stockholm Challenge award apart from several others.
What was conceived as an effective supply chain delivery for its agri commodity business soon evolved into a universal platform for rural India for a basket of goods, services and, most critical of all, information access with capabilities to bring about life-altering change.
The key triggers to the development of the e-choupal model have been challenges posed by Indian agriculture, characterised by fragmented farms, weak infrastructure and the involvement of numerous intermediaries.
Today, the platform literally connects rural India to the world. It provides the farmer with access on weather reports customised to his region, lends best farming practices, and provides goods and services like farm implements, fertilizers to banking and insurance products at his doorstep.
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And the basket of services continues to expand. The problems encountered by ITC in setting up and managing these e-choupals included inadequacies in power supply, telecom connectivity and bandwidth, apart from resistance from middlemen and imparting skills to first-time internet users in remote areas. ITC (agri business division) CEO, S Sivakumar, who is the chief architect of the e-choupal project, says, “The challenge now is to sustain this innovation.”The scope of the e-choupal has gone way beyond its blueprint like Choupal Sagar, the rural retail chain, which was not part of the original plan. Going forward, the role and shape of e-choupal will continue to evolve in line with the ideations of the e-choupal community of end-users itself, he adds. In the future, services like health, education and business process outsourcing could be added to the e-choupal ambit.
Mr Sivakumar chooses to call the e-choupal as a business initiative with a social collateral. The e-choupal, which has witnessed capex of Rs 200 crore and revenue expenditure of Rs 150 crore, could see outlays of Rs 5,000 crore over the next five to seven years.
Unlike a traditional organisation, where the top management is the visionary and junior management executes the mission, the e-choupal community of 40,000 frontline beneficiaries and end users are the principal ideators. New business models and services have been added to the basket primarily as a result of an unmet need expressed by the community.
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ITC’s key role is to provide ‘orchestration infrastructure’ or synthesizing these experiments. Mr Sivakumar says the e-choupal essentially works on four pillars of digital infrastructure (IT, internet access), physical infrastructure (Choupal Sagars), human infrastructure (sanchalaks and sanyojaks) and network orchestration by ITC. ITC has brought a network of insurance companies, banks, micro-finance entities, seed and fertilizer companies, FMCG, e-learning and training organisations to the doorstep of rural India. Launched in June 2000, e-Choupal is the largest initiative among all internet-based interventions in rural India.
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Its services reach out to over 3.5 million farmers growing a range of crops — soyabean, coffee, wheat, rice, pulses, shrimp — in over 31,000 villages through 5,200 kiosks across six states of Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan.Download
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