Ekgaon to scale up IT-enabled rural services, venture overseas

Ekgaon, a Delhi-based technology and management services company that focuses on rural areas, which recently won the Dell Small Business Excellence Award in India, is now looking to scale up its business and presence in both India and overseas.

Started in 2002, ekgaon provides IT-enabled solutions for financial services, agricultural services and e-governance in rural areas.

Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya, co-founder and chief executive officer, ekgaon, said, “We are looking for venture funding to scale up our presence. We plan to reach 15 million clients in the next five years.”

The company provides software solutions to banks and insurance companies to deal with rural markets. Through these solutions it has served 50,000 individuals in Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka with mobile banking for a minimal charge of 15-25 paise per transaction.

 

Now it plans to introduce remittance services by mid-next year. It will also launch these services in Nepal and West Africa.

It also provides agricultural services like weather forecasts, information on fertilisers and nutrients through SMS and IVR in Tamil Nadu free of cost. It will soon be launching these in Uttar Pradesh.

In February this year, the company had also bagged Best Paper of the Compendium Award in the 12th National e-Governance Conference held by the Central government in Goa.

Ekgaon has developed solutions which allow central tracking and monitoring of rural entitlement programmes like PDS and pension. In collaboration with NGOs it collects information and data on these schemes from the entitled rural folk over mobile through SMS.

The data then enters a central sever directly and automatically generates a report on how many people have benefitted from the schemes. It then shares the report with the respective authorities to crack down on corruption. Ekgaon has covered 44,000 households under this programme in Orissa.