[1]Why bring rural India to the world? Let’s take the world to rural India instead. That was the thought that encouraged Savitha Malappa to settle on the idea of a rural BPO (business process outsourcing).
An engineer from Bengaluru, Savitha went off to Texas to study some more. “After a few years, I got married and my husband and I were always very clear that we wanted to come back to India,” she says. They came back in 2000, when the software industry was at its peak, times were exciting, and Savitha found herself riding the wave too. It was her husband's sense of belonging to his ancestral village in Chamarajanagar that gave Savitha her first glimpse of rural India.
“We used to go out there quite often and as we continued visiting, my thought processes slowly began to change. How can technology and the state of life in rural areas connect? Where do we bridge the gap?” she found herself wondering. Having internet connectivity and electricity will make life in a village just as good as sitting in an office in a metro, she reasoned.
“When I was heading the services section of a company, I saw a lot of people migrating to India from non-urban areas and I noticed many of them weren’t too happy," Savitha says. As rural folk migrated to the city in hordes in the hope of living their dream and became quickly disillusioned by long commutes and soaring costs of living, it slowly became clear to Savitha what she wanted to do.
“We are bringing in people from a different socio-economic system where they have a lot of support and bringing them here, where they have nothing,” she says of the migration pattern which is clearly a wrong model.
“I needed to know where my skill sets lay,” Savitha says, lapsing now and then into corporate parlance. “Twenty years ago, my skill set only offered me jobs in the US. Today, you can do anything you like here, be it neuro-science or art.” To enable rural Indians to do these things in their homes so they wouldn’t have to struggle in cities became the mission.
The BPO began a year and a half ago, a non voiced BPO with no real-time date processing services. They transcribe video, audio, archaeological texts, which they digitise and also make web-enabled.
“If you really go rural, it’s difficult to find the right skill level, so we have a hub-and-spoke model.” The hub is located in Mysore, and Chamarajanagar is the first rural area providing services.
“We need to leverage companies into looking at the rural model and outsource to these areas,” Savitha says. This shift in attitude needs a social approach as well as a business model and India is still adjusting to the idea of it. “It’s easier to find people in the US who are willing to work with us than find an Indian urban company who will,” Savitha observes. “See how China has grown through its SEZs. At some point, after all, the cities become completely saturated.”
It’s been a steady rise for the BPO, which now has about 80 employees. The bulk of their work so far has been transcribing archaeological texts, working closely with an NGO while they do so. They have digitised the Census Records Project and even IIT lectures.
Savitha found that in even the most backward regions of Chamarajanagar everybody appears to have a degree but most aren’t quite sure what to do with it. “Men leave to go to the cities but many women still hesitate,” she says. “They are our target group.
The reaction has been mixed so far, but it’s catching on. Sometimes, they want to leave and study further, which we encourage.”
Not all the employees will stick on, but they have been given a glimpse of what the corporate boom can do for them. For once, the grass they’re standing on is green enough.
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[1] http://archive.asianage.com/untitled-319jpgcropdisplayjpg-365