Rural job portals fail to connect……….Varun Sood
Lack of awarenessleads to low success rate; websites beton divergent modelsfor future growth
Lack of awarenessleads to low success rate; websites beton divergent modelsfor future growth
Once every week, Narayana Swamy gets on a bus and leaves his village of Dandiganahalli to travel the 6km to Vijayapur, a town 55km away from Bangalore. Vijayapur has six cyber cafés, and at one of these, after the customary ritual of checking his email, Swamy settles down to search for jobsby simply Googling for them.
Swamy, a 21-year-old graduate in computer science, should ideally have heard of job portals, particularly those aimed at rural youth. But he hasnt, and neither have the two other graduates in the cyber café, Raghavendra Gowda and Manjunatha Chandrashekar, both of whom have a background in agriculture. So, while Swami wants to work in sales, he doesnt know that an electronics company has, on 17 May, posted an advertisement for salesmen in Uttar Pradesh on www.rozgarduniya.com.
Is it some company that offers jobs? asks a puzzled Shiva Hombaiah, a 22-year-old student, who works part-time at the cyber café, when quizzed about www.villagenaukri.com and www.rozgarduniya.com.
Shiva, a final-year computer science student, bemoans the lack of Internet in villages, as well as the lack of employment. Where do graduates like me look for jobs? There are no jobs hereI can only work in a big city.
The travails of Swamy and Shiva should lead the owners of rural job portals to question their existing strategynoble as it isof bridging the gap between rural India and rising employment opportunities.
The owner of Indias oldest such portal, RuralNaukri.com, has in fact already gone back to the drawing board, reworking its plan for reaching out to millions of potentially employable rural youth.
RuralNaukri.com, which began in 2001 by advertising job opportunities at companies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in rural areas, found its applicants to be largely youngsters from towns and cities, interested in working in the countryside. Ajay Gupta, the portals founder and chief executive, thus launched VillageNaukri.com in 2005. This portal aimed at generating jobs for the less-skilled workforce in the villages. But in five years of operation, Gupta admits, only 1,000-odd people have been recruited through the portal.
RozgarDuniya.com, the other prominent portal, was launched in August as a partnership between the global recruitment portal Monster and ITC Ltd, the tobacco and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company. Until June, a little over 150 people had found jobs using this portal, which is available in both English and Hindi.
Both companies refused to share the number of visitors to the websites, although Gupta acknowledges that it is negligible. VillageNaukri.com, he says, is still not offering a viable business solution.
Rural job portals can help spread awareness. It is a sort of opportunity. But that is possible only if people (themselves) know about them, says Aruna Roy, a social activist with deep experience of the demographics of rural India. There is no one solution… Unemployment is a multi-layered problem and job portals or MGNREGS (the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme) alone cannot help solve the problem.
One of the biggest obstacles faced by these portals is also the most obvious: A lack of Internet connections in rural households. Broadband penetration in the country is a mere 0.74%, and of the nine million broadband subscribers at the end of April, just 6% are in rural areas. When he had launched VillageNaukri.com five years ago, Modi says, he had anticipated the growth in broadband to keep pace with the boom in cellphone userssomething that never happened.
This obstacle for these portals is as vast as their potential. According to the governments National Sample Survey of 2004-05, 39.97 million people in both urban and rural areas were registered with the 968 employment exchanges to seek jobs. Youth forms a particularly massive section of employable India; Media Research Users Council, a Mumbai-based non-profit, estimates that there are 122 million 20-25-year-olds in the country, 70 million of whom are from the rural poor.
Academics such as Rajesh Chakrabarti, assistant professor of finance at the Indian School of Business, believe that although MGNREGS has had a positive impact, state-sponsored subsidies, particularly in Karnataka, have hampered labour mobility.
How do you convince the youth to move when the state is providing many benefits, he asks rhetorically. How job portals deal with this issuewhere a youth will be posted in another village or cityneeds to be seen.
MGNREGS is one government-initiated measure, but it offers little for the educated unemployed. At the same time, big cities have started to come under pressurerising land prices, inadequate infrastructureforcing companies to turn to the countryside for expansion. These were the developments that spurred entrepreneurs such as Gupta and companies such as Monster to launch rural job portals, hoping to provide better opportunities to the rural youth.
Lakhs of workers are required for the construction industry. The healthcare industry needs thousands of medical representatives. FMCG companies need people to cover the last mile on cycles. Warehouse offices need people to manage, says Gupta. These are the jobs that can be accessed by the village youth.
Both RozgarDuniya.com and VillageNaukri.com are, interestingly, now betting on divergent models for future growth. While VillageNaukri.com will focus heavily on training, after having found many rural youth lacking in soft skills, RozgarDuniya.com is preparing to deploy ITCs vast e-Choupal network.
VillageNaukri.com is shortlisting candidates from the 145,000 resumes it has in its database, hoping to train and place them. Its redrawn plan aims to set up training centres in buildings hired from local village bodies. New candidates will be coached to improve their soft skills by some of the 10,000 graduates registered with the portal.
Perhaps optimistically, Gupta also hopes to ask technology firms for voluntary contributions of computers to these training centres.
All these measures should help keep costs low, he says. By the end of the year, we would be undertaking a survey in four states and hopefully then we will launch a new version by early next year. Obviously, a lot of this depends on the funding we get from companies.
Sanjay Modi, managing director of Monster.com for India, West Asia and Southeast Asia, said that his company has, since the beginning of 2010, entered phase II of its programme. The programme targets four statesUttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
Modi is hoping to expand Monsters presence through ITCs network of e-Choupals, the rural Internet kiosks that successfully became a key component of local supply chains when they were launched in 2000.
We are already covering 10,000 villages through 1,870 e-Choupals of ITC, and this strategy has proved to be very successful, Modi says. The portal plans to scale up its presence to nine states and 40,000 villages by the end of the year. We will be training the e-Choupal sanchalaksfarmers who were trained to operate the kiosksto help others in their community use the website and apply for jobs.
RozgarDuniya.com also plans to use technology to bridge the gap between job seekers and employers.
Monster will use its existing partnership with Dish TVused, at present, to provide an interactive job search serviceto advertise jobs on television.
Further, it will also advertise jobs through cellphones; a quick roll-out of third-generation mobile and broadband wireless services may help Monster overcome the traditional constraint of low rural Internet penetration.
There are close to 370 million workers in the unorganized sector, (and) that includes those in the agriculture sector and the self-employed, Modi observes. Only 40 million of these work in the organized sector. So all the present job portals have an audience of 40 million job seekers. Imagine the potential that can be tapped.