Drishtee

Drishtee in Rural India

The role of Drishtee in Rural India is continuous, productive and development-oriented. With its aim of delivering services and related information to the village community through its Information Kiosk, Drishtee has been recognized as a leading player in the Information and Communication for Development domain. The total number of services offered on the Drishtee network in Rural India has grown from a figure of three to twelve and it has been able to create 1500 jobs in the rural segment.

1. Drishtee’s Role as an Organization:
As an organization Drishtee Development And Communication Ltd. is committed to reform the socio-political scenario of the Indian village. Incorporated in August 2000, the organization seeks to mark a paradigmatic shift in the delivery of services to rural India by serving villagers directly instead of intermediaries. Contractual arrangements with state governments provide the bedrock upon which Drishtee is able to build a network of sustainable franchises. The local entrepreneurs provide additional customized services to the surrounding villages such as ICT training, regional job postings and even matrimonial services, while the entire network is increasingly utilized as an outlet for commercial services such as insurance, education, and agri-services. In association with its partners like Microsoft, Intel, ICICI, Scojo Foundation, Amaron, HCL, CEEP, Quiver Infoservices Ltd. and Drishtee Foundation, Drishtee is serving 1.5 million villagers of India.

2. Drishtee as an Innovator:
Drishtee is a rural network for delivering services and related information to the village community through an ICT Center called as Drishtee Soochnalaya or Information Kiosk. The Kiosks are run by entrepreneurs selected from the villages and have been designed to follow a service-delivery based revenue model.

More than 600,000 villages of India house two-thirds of its people, and earn one-third of the national income. A report by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) in India shows that rural consumers represent more than 50 percent of consuming classes and are the prime target market for consumer goods and essential services such as education, healthcare and employment. Despite such an open market, around 68% of the rural economy still lies untapped. Villagers are desperate for appropriate services at affordable cost – from education to market access, from telecom to healthcare, from financial intermediation to entertainment. But the non-availability of such services linked to the lack of perceived opportunities in rural areas by the investors creates a dead end for progress.

Drishtee’s innovation is manifested in charting an alternate distribution network for products and services in rural India.

3. Drishtee as an Initiator:
In a short span of five years Drishtee has been able to successfully initiate and run several services in various parts of Rural India, for which the villagers mostly had to travel to the nearest town or city.

• Initiation in Education: To reduce the technological gap and to bring the rural youth up-front with the city people, Drishtee took the initiative to introduce Computer and English education by the name of CEEP to various villages. Receiving a huge response did not come as a surprise to Drishtee. Although there were many other players who were trying to establish themselves, Drishtee never considered them as its competitor, as the objective of Drishtee was not revenue generation, but to bring ICT to the Rural India at the lowest possible cost. Currently there are more than 4000 CEEP students across Indian parishes, which give an estimation of the successful students who already completed this course and those who are still waiting to join and avail this opportunity, when all the course duration lies between 3 months to 1 year.
• Initiation in Employment generation: Drishtee through its Rural BPO Project, intends to leverage ICT for BPO Services on a pilot basis, at rural level, to learn and understand the potentiality, problems and business dynamics on BPO services with a view to generate employment for local educated youths as-well-as to help develop a sustainable business model that could be scalable and replicable in other parts of rural India. This pilot study was carried out in a small village named ‘Saurath’ in Madhubani district of Bihar state, situated in eastern India. After gauging the success of the pilot, Drishtee has ready plans to replicate this project across five odd kiosks and later on the whole concept will be replicated across all Drishtee kiosks and rolled out as one of the services.
• Initiation in Women Empowerment: Drishtee aims to spread the benefits of ICT to thousands of women in the rural India. This initiative has already been taken in some parts of the country. Currently, there are various Drishtee Kiosks most of them owned by men serving the purpose of providing ICT based services to the people. Very few female in villages get the opportunity to own a soochnalaya or kiosk. To encourage women’s participation, Drishtee had taken up the project “Unlimited Potential” in collaboration with University of Manchester United to create and develop more and better women’s ICT based enterprises.

  Drishtee believes technology can play an important role in facilitating its objectives which could further result in upgrading and improving the hidden caliber and efficiency of the women power existing in India.

• Initiation in Providing e-health: Drishtee along with its partners and its network of ICT kiosks is proposing to take a major lead in taking quality health services to the rural populace. It proposes to involve leading players in the health care domain and synergize their competency and bind it with the strength and credibility of ICT entrepreneur to reach a broad based section of the community.
• Initiation in Promoting the Rural Artisans: In association with Quiver Infoservices Ltd., through www.drishteehaat.com, an online store for rural artisans to showcase their products to those who appreciate the traditional and ethnic art of India, Drishtee has extended its hand to introduce to the world the real artisans behind these arts. These artisans (mostly women) are from the lowest income starta of rural India. Drishtee has taken the initiation to bring in front those artisans who miss their part of fame and appreciation from the world, which is taken away by the intermediaries, leaving behind the artisans with a handful of money.
• Initiation in Micro-finance: Through the pilot study that was done to understand the current status on loan requirement in the village as-well-as to assess the potentiality of this market in the village, during Panchayat Adhayan in Saurath, Drishtee decided to come up with a solution for the villagers, where they can take small loans from banks at a lower interest rate, and safeguard themselves from getting exploited by the local merchants and relatives, who charge interest rates as high as 30%. Drishtee along with its partner ICICI Bank has tied up to offer custom designed micro loans to the rural people, which will help them to improve their economic activities.

4. Drishtee as a Service Provider:
The services of Drishtee are developed with the focus on better earning of the Kiosks as well as better growth opportunities for the community. Typically, the services are divided into local services and Centralized services.The local services can be offered at kiosk level itself, whereas the Centralized services are those which are offered through Drishtee. The centralized services further can be divided into computer based services such as computer and English education, and other services and products such as Insurance, Recharge coupons for mobiles and even products such as Scojo reading glasses and Amaron batteries.

The local services which have been successful include: Operating a Digital Photo Studio, Entertainment services through the DVD of the computer and Various Internet based information services that the Kiosk can easily offer such as information on Agricultural products like Mandi rates or Weather information, or exam results or even some limited e-governance services that the Government has recently introduced for free access.

Drishtee presently in most of the areas does not offer e-governance services. Availability of e-governance service in a village depends upon the local administration, district administration and the state government. In case this service becomes available in the near future, it would be considered as a bonus for the villagers.

Services offered:
The services that are offered from a kiosk can be divided in two parts: Services and Products

In its journey of 6 years with limited resources in hand, Drishtee has been able to successfully replicate its model across India. In its quest to provide services to the rural communities across India it has learnt some hard lessons in the past but it still has an appetite for learning more. Considering its customers as its teachers Drishtee has gained several valuable insights over the years.