Thanks to my dear fellow colleague #SanjayKumarRay from Bhubaneswar that we’re able to share another idea to enable good (incentivised) marketing assistance to remote areas of Bharat.
Sanjay comes with a rich background of nearly 3 decades (half of which were spent with corporates) and the other half in the villages working closely to empower communities of Odisha and several North East States.
This pilot that he conducted was in district Kheda of Gujarat for E Mandi for Tobacco farmers in 2010. The interventions were very simple yet very effective and incentivising for the farmers.
He introduced 1 VLE (Village Level Entrepreneur) per 3 Gram Panchayats as Common Service Centre of GoI assistance. Some 70 centres were organised to cover 200+ Gram Panchayats. The local tobacco farmers had the following problems:
- The majority of market returns were going to middlemen
- They didn’t have any idea of final consumer companies’
- The demand Vs. Supply data was missing in the producers plans thereby playing against the farmers interests
Together with his VLEs he created a data base of all the farmers, tobacco stocks, grade, etc. and these VLEs stared sending the data to companies which will ultimately be buying these stocks from the middlemen.
These companies started sharing data of where do they need consignments, what prices, inspection SoP, grade quality parameters etc. Immediately there was a ray of hope for the farmers since they could see the price difference and started organising themselves on the desired final guidelines of these consumer companies.
The participating farmer gained 40-50% additional prices from this system and thereby giving rise to the idea that IT at villages can be an empowering tool. Last 15 years we all have seen several e marketing interventions.
Yet if the farmers aren’t happy with the markets (which is a common observation for many areas for many crops) do we need to look at the POTENTIAL THAT TECHNOLOGY IS OFFERING AND WE ARE NEGLECTING. Market information based planning, production and supplies with no or little middlemen ship (which derives its earning purely on the merit of the function and not on exploitative terms) has been cherished since independence. Maybe the time has come and with many successful information dissemination based marketing connect endeavours around; something substantial is in the making!!
FOOD FOR THOUGHT.