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| Experts bullish on rural demand | |
| B Krishna Mohan / Chennai/ Hyderabad April 07, 2009, 0:50 IST | |
The impact of recession on rural areas has been minimum and experts believe there is a huge opportunity to be tapped as several businesses are centred around rural areas and employ rural youth.
Business Standard interacted with some of the experts, who were here to make a presentation on ‘harnessing the power of abundance’ at the Indian School of Business recently.
According to Ashok Jhunjhunwala, mentor of eJeevika Human Resource Private Limited, there is scope for outsourcing manufacturing to rural areas. eJeevika is an enterprise incubated under the IIT Madras’ Rural Technology Business Incubator (RTBI).
eJeevika is focusing on creating rural employment, bridging labour shortage in high growth industries, making rural youth employable and assisting corporations to penetrate the rural markets. It currently trains candidates in retail sales, data entry and security services verticals and uses information and communication technology predominantly. “We plant to train 3,000 people every month,” says Jhunjhunwala, who is also the chairman of RTBI.
The RTBI is planning to take health practitioners to rural areas. It had earlier implemented a remote ECG and also utilised a remote stethoscope and facilitated telemedicine with a basic video conference model. It has also designed a low-cost biometric-enabled ATM machine. Among others, it is working on a rainfall prediction system, bringing farmers to the commodity exchanges to realise better prices, adding voice to Internet for those who are not comfortable with typing.
“There is a need to fix rural India by creating and improving the health, education infrastructure and providing livelihood opportunities to ensure rural people do not migrate,” he says.
Lakshmi Venkataramana Venkatesan, co-founder of Bharatiya Yuva Shakti Trust, feels the effort should be to create opportunities for the underprivileged. BYST has so far financed over 1,500 entrepreneurs creating employment for 15,000 people.
BYST is envisaging to scale up the number of entrepreneurs to 100,000 and creating half-a-million jobs in Delhi, rural Haryana, Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad and rural Maharashtra. The trust has embarked on an e-learning initiative, under which it has trained 1,000 trainers, who will mentor online.
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