Never Give Poor Solutions
To Poor People
It was Chetna Gala Sinha of Man Deshi Bank and Foundation who said, “Never give
poor solutions to poor people.” That powerful sentence has stayed with me.
Have we as business leaders ignored the potential of rural India when it
comes to tech products? Should we question our default setting of introducing
tech products first in the metros and then “trickle” it down to smaller towns a
couple of years down the line?
These thoughts took me back to an animated conversation I had with a village housewife in 2012, over a decade ago. She lived in a village of not more than 5000 people around 40 kms from Aurangabad. I dug up this photo.
It was taken in the kitchen
of this housewife. It’s not the mixer that is important, but the induction
cook-top.
An induction cook-top in the kitchen of a home in a 5000-population village in
the year 2012! Even then I found it unusual. I asked the friendly lady about
it, and she told me that she had bought the cook-top because it was very
useful. For one thing, it was safer than the conventional coil heater that she
was used to, and it also consumed less electricity. Plus, it was compact. She
used it when the gas got over.
At that time, in 2012, induction cooktops were just coming into the market. And
like all new technology they were targeted at the urban elite: to the
housewives in Bandra and Def Col who wanted their kitchens to have the very
latest of everything. And marketing managers created communication something
like this https://lnkd.in/d9ne96pm
or like this https://lnkd.in/dGGNtRxY
They wouldn’t have suspected that there was a demand for induction cook-tops in
the villages of India, not then, in 2012. Business heads chose to focus on the
metro markets and created communication and product features to attract the
metro housewife.
Despite this there were rural housewives who saw the benefits of the induction
cook-top for a rural kitchen and went and purchased it. Imagine what could have
happened if there was a rural specific product and focussed communication for
induction cook tops in 2012 for the rural market. Could the market have grown
faster? Maybe.
Today we are in 2022. I wonder how many high-tech products are being targeted
towards rural consumers in communication that they understand and are designed
in a way that they can use?
First Published July 2022