INCLUSIVE GROWTH INITIATIVE

USING MOBILE TECHNOLOGY

Preamble:
We, founders of Metric, have been involved in problems of rural development &
poverty alleviation for the last 30 years. For some time, we worked intensively in rural
areas organizing the rural poor. We carried out major research in transfer of
technology to farmers. Our work has resulted in novel approaches for effective
transfer of technology to farmers. This is now a major backbone of the consultancy
we offer to many national and international companies in the area of ‘risk aversion by
rural investors’.

However, we must confess, a feasible solution for alleviating rural poverty has eluded
us throughout this period.

We started a telephonic information collection hub in Pune Head Office (*1) as a

necessary service for doing cost effective market research. The staff attrition rate in
Pune was very high. We shifted our information collection hub to a rural area.

The experience of the Rural Communication Hub at Bopordi Village(*2) has given us
courage to conceive a novel initiative for removal of rural poverty. We have named
this bold idea as, ‘Inclusive Growth Initiative (IGI)’.

The essential details of IGI along with funding requirements are summarized in the
following pages.

*1 91, Florida Estate A Soc

Keshavnagar, Pune
Maharashtra, India, 411036

*2 Metric Communication Hub, at and Post Bopordi,

Tal. Wai, Dist. Satara, Maharashtra, India.

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The Concept

Despite major focus on inclusive growth, the real poor – families below poverty line-
remain excluded. The real question is how to reach below poverty line families and
mentor them to come out of poverty. Innovative combination of the latest
developments in information technology and communication technology provides a
possible answer.

Personalized mass communication is possible today because of revolutionary

developments in information technology and communication technology.

Sufficiently large resources are reserved for poverty alleviation programs under
various schemes of central and state governments. The resources should be
directed efficiently to the poor according to their needs and capabilities.

It is necessary to monitor and mentor the poor to enable them to come out of poverty.

It is proposed to create a network of horizontal and personalized communication with

the poor families through a rural communication hub.

The rural communication hub will be staffed by local educated youth supported by
access to the latest, reliable and relevant information

Each young rural communicator at the hub will have personal computer connected
with various information platforms through a server.

Continuous two-way communication will be established by distributing mobile

telephones to poor families.

Each hub worker will be the nodal agent for 35 to 40 poor families.

The nodal agent will make personal visits to the families. He will have information
about the families with their photographs on his desktop.

At least one dialogue with a family member will take place every day.

The nodal agent will direct and monitor the flow of capital and other resources to the
family.

The hub will have the best information and communication technology.

All transactions through the hub will be recorded and can be supervised from remote
location.

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Parallel International Thinking:

In 1997, the Rockefeller Foundation began an exploration to, in part, answer nagging
questions: why is the communication work of many Foundation grantees scatter-shot,
unsustainable and heavily message driven? This resulted in formation of Communication for
Social Change Consortium in early 2003. In their Working Paper Series: No.1 , they have
advocated their approach which bears striking resemblance with the communication practice
philosophy developed by Metric’s founders over the two decade long research and
implementation. Some of the common approaches are:

 Sustainability of social change is more likely if the individuals and communities most
affected own the process and content of communication.

 Communication for social change should be empowering, horizontal (versus top-

down), give a voice to the previously unheard members of the community, and be
biased towards local content and ownership.

 Communities should be the agents of their own change.

 Emphasis should shift from persuasion and the transmission of information from
outside technical experts to dialogue, debate and negotiation on issues that resonate
with members of the community.

 Emphasis on outcomes should go beyond individual behavior to social norms,

policies, culture and the supporting environment.

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 The project design:

Relevant meaningful and timely dialogue will be the Key Responsibility

Area (KRAs) for the hub.

Some subjects of Dialogue

Micro Enterprise
Family planning and Pre-natal care
Breast feeding, Immunization
Attendance at school
Personal Hygiene
How to rear sheep
Smokeless chulhas
De-addiction, Superstitions
Songs, Pilgrimage
Marketing of produce and much more

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Communication to correct individual behavior through social action

Your Mobile

He is
drinking
He is
drinking

Girija’s
Husband is
drunk

No beating of Girija !
Get sober, then come home.
United, we stand !!

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 Major benefits

 Connected with the world

 Aspiring community
 Income through micro enterprise
 Support for marketing the produce
 Better school attendance
 Improved health
 Smaller family
 New skills
 De-addiction
 Higher life expectancy
 Eradication of endemic poverty
 Quality of life
 Vibrant self reliant community

The current programs – a brief critique

Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 (NREGA) guarantees 100
days of wage employment in a year, at least Rs.70/- per day, to do un-skilled manual work.
The program does not develop human capital either by developing skills or by changing
attitudes; makes poverty endemic. For instance, state of Maharashtra which is industrially
most advanced has third largest number of poor families despite employment guarantee
scheme being operational in Maharashtra for 40 years.

Microfinance helps small traders to pay lower interest (even then more than 30% per
annum) than if they were to borrow from money lenders. However, small traders generally
do not come from below poverty line families. Microfinance is not effective in developing
entrepreneurship amongst the poor.

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Metric’s specific expertise

Metric has proved the practice of rural call centers by successfully operating a commercial
rural call center at Vil: Bopordi, Tal: Wai, Dist: Satara, Maharashtra. This communication hub
has been providing services for the last three years and employees 65 persons. Metric has
evolved special strategies and techniques for Local recruitment, Training (On-The-Job,
Residential), Special purpose software systems, and Communication content development,
Low cost infrastructure which ensures enjoyable working environment, Monitoring and
mentoring systems.

Metric attracted best youngsters to the job, the attrition rate being less than 3 % per year.

Scope of services to be provided by Metric:

Infrastructure: Identification of site, Hiring of premises, Specifications of equipment, Interior

design and lay-out, Assistance in purchasing the equipment, Installation of the equipment,
Contracting for maintenance of the infrastructure during and after warranty, Specification of
software to be purchased, Development of specialized software, Installation of software,
Development of data storage, data retrieval and data up-gradation systems, Specifying
requirements of communication systems, Negotiating & finalizing service contracts with
telecommunication partner.

Human resources: Organizational structure, Organizational chart with KRAs, Recruitment,

Compensation, Career planning, Developing and executing induction training and ongoing
training, Monitoring and mentoring.

Operational Excellence processes: System design, Data collection, Incentives, Quality

assessment through stakeholders, Achievement of operational objectives, Benchmark and
ongoing stakeholder surveys, Reporting and review.

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Unique Benefits of Rural Communication Hub (RCH):

1. IGI will substantially reduce poverty of a significantly large number of the BPL population
in five years. Poverty will be reduced in all its facets, i.e. Economic poverty, poor Health,
poor Education, Social Deprivation and Cultural poverty.

2. IGI combines the two of the latest technologies viz. information technology and
communication technology in a fashion which has become feasible only during the last
three years. It makes mass communication personalized.

3. IGI brings the best in the world within the reach of the poorest of the families.

4. IGI will continuously re-invent itself to address the aspirations of the community.

5. IGI workers join the program because it is the most coveted job in the area. IGI will,
therefore, attract the best youngsters to the task of removing poverty.

6. IGI workers are highly motivated because the job is coveted, the work is done sitting in a
good office, with a team. The worker is recognized as a leader and ‘do gooder’ by his
own community and the job demands no ‘sacrifice’

7. Government schemes, and most NGO activities, are supply centric, they focus on specific
supply of product over services. IGI is the only family centric system which gives
integrated support in all facets of family life.

8. IGI will create human capital in the form of better productive skills, economic capital in
the form of micro enterprises, social capital in the form of a connected and thriving
community and cultural capital cherishing traditions and modernity simultaneously.

9. IGI is highly replicable and can be practiced almost anywhere in the Indian sub-
continent; in an area surrounding modern factories, in a farming community, amongst
fishermen and in tribal areas.

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Annexure 2

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Some more examples of parallel international thinking

Dr. Phill Bartle is a well known social scientist. He is a senior planner, trainer and adviser of
development projects. He has over thirty years of experience in education, planning and
management; with emphasis on social and community development, in Africa and Asia. He
specializes in the sociology of communities, and in community empowerment

In a workshop on poverty, he had the following to say

Poverty as a Social Problem:

We have all felt a shortage of cash at times. That is an individual experience. It is not the
same as the social problem of poverty. While money is a measure of wealth, lack of cash can
be a measure of lack of wealth, but it is not the social problem of poverty.

Poverty as a social problem is a deeply embedded wound that permeates every dimension of
culture and society. It includes sustained low levels of income for members of a community.
It includes a lack of access to services like education, markets, health care, lack of decision
making ability, and lack of communal facilities like water, sanitation, roads, transportation,
and communications. Furthermore, it is a "poverty of spirit," that allows members of that
community to believe in and share despair, hopelessness, apathy, and timidity. Poverty,
especially the factors that contribute to it, is a social problem, and its solution is social.

The simple transfer of funds, even if it is to the victims of poverty, will not eradicate or reduce
poverty. It will merely alleviate the symptoms of poverty in the short run. It is not a durable
solution. Poverty as a social problem calls for a social solution. That solution is the clear,
conscious and deliberate removal of the big five factors of poverty.

Factors, Causes and History:

A "factor" and a "cause" are not quite the same thing. A "cause" can be seen as something
that contributes to the origin of a problem like poverty, while a "factor" can be seen as
something that contributes to its continuation after it already exists.

Poverty on a world scale has many historical causes: colonialism, slavery, war and conquest.
There is an important difference between those causes and what we call factors that
maintain conditions of poverty. The difference is in terms of what we, today, can do about
them. We cannot go back into history and change the past. Poverty exists. Poverty was
caused. What we potentially can do something about are the factors that perpetuate poverty.

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It is well known that many nations of Europe, faced by devastating wars, such as World Wars
I and II, were reduced to bare poverty, where people were reduced to living on handouts and
charity, barely surviving. Within decades they had brought themselves up in terms of real
domestic income, to become thriving and influential modern nations of prosperous people.
We know also that many other nations have remained among the least developed of the
planet, even though billions of dollars of so-called "aid" money was spent on them. Why?
Because the factors of poverty were not attacked, only the symptoms were. At the macro or
national level, a low GDP (gross domestic product) is not the poverty itself; it is the symptom
of poverty, as a social problem.

The factors of poverty (as a social problem) that are listed here, ignorance, disease, apathy,
dishonesty and dependency, are to be seen simply as conditions. No moral judgement is
intended. They are not good or bad, they just are. If it is the decision of a group of people,
as in a society or in a community, to reduce and remove poverty, they will have to, without
value judgement, observe and identify these factors, and take action to remove them as the
way to eradicate poverty.

The big five, in turn, contribute to secondary factors such as lack of markets, poor
infrastructure, poor leadership, bad governance, under-employment, lack of skills,
absenteeism, lack of capital, and others. Each of these are social problems, each of them
are caused by one or more of the big five, and each of them contribute to the perpetuation of
poverty, and their eradication is necessary for the removal of poverty.

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From ‘Report on Information & Communication Technology for Poverty alleviation’

Author: Roger Harris;

Published by
United Nations Development Programme’s
Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (UNDP-APDIP)
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Under the right circumstances, ICTs have been shown to be capable of inducing social and
economic development in terms of health care, improved education, employment,
agriculture, and trade, and also of enriching local culture. Yet making this possible is by no
means straightforward, as it involves more than the mere deployment of technology and
requires as much learning on the part of the promoters of the technology as on the part of its
users. It is all too easy to introduce technology with great expectations; it is far more
challenging to create the necessary conditions under which the technology can attain its full
potential, requiring as it does the combined and coordinated efforts of a range of
stakeholders with disparate interests.

In the same report, he sites experiences in Bangla Desh and China

The well-known case of Grameen hand phones in Bangladesh, in which the Grameen Bank,
the village-based micro-finance organization, leases cellular mobile phones to successful
members, has delivered significant benefits to the poor. The phones are mostly used for
exchanging price and business and health related information. They have generated
information flows that have resulted in better prices for outputs and inputs, easier job
searches, reduced mortality rates for livestock and poultry, and better returns on foreign-
exchange transactions.

A study in China found that villages that had the telephone, the most basic communications
technology, experienced declines in the purchase price of various commodities and lower
future price variability. It also noted that the average prices of agricultural commodities were
higher in villages with phones than in villages without phones. Vegetable growers said that
access to telephones helped them to make more appropriate production decisions, and
users of agricultural inputs benefited from a smoother and more reliable supply. Better
information also improved some sellers’ perception of their bargaining position vis-à-vis
traders or intermediaries. Finally, village telephones facilitated job searches, access to
emergency medical care and the ability to deal with natural disasters; lowered mortality rates

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for livestock thanks to more timely advice from extension workers; and improved rates in
foreign-exchange transactions (Eggleston et al., 2002).

Some other benefits of ICT to the poor include

Promoting local entrepreneurship

It has been claimed that ICTs have the potential to impact the livelihood strategies of small-
scale enterprises and local entrepreneurs in the following areas:
 Natural capital - opportunities for accessing national government policies
 Financial capital - communication with lending organizations, e.g., for micro-credit
 Human capital - increased knowledge of new skills through distance learning and
processes required for certification
 Social capital - cultivating contacts beyond the immediate community
 Physical capital - lobbying for the provision of basic infrastructure

Improving poor people’s health

Health care is one of the most promising areas for poverty alleviation with ICTs, based
largely as it is on information resources and knowledge. There are many ways in which ICTs
can be applied to achieve desirable health outcomes. ICTs are being used in developing
countries to facilitate remote consultation, diagnosis, and treatment. Thus, physicians in
remote locations can take advantage of the professional skills and experiences of colleagues
and collaborating institutions.

Building capacity and capability

The key question for poverty alleviation seems to be whether ICTs can build the capacity of
the poorest people to achieve whatever goals they may have. If you are illiterate, destitute,
disabled, malnourished, low caste, homeless and jobless, will ICTs help? The most likely
scenario is that these very poor people will receive assistance from organizations and
institutions that use ICTs and whose programmes specifically target them as
beneficiaries.Capacity building also relates to the accumulation of social capital, which refers
to those features of social organization such as networks, norms and social trust that
facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit. The establishment of networks for
mutual benefit can be nurtured and extended through the use of ICTs. ICTs can help create
and sustain on-line and off-line networks that introduce and interconnect people who are
working toward similar goals.

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From Cell phones may help "save" Africa
By Rhett Butler, mongabay.com
July 11, 2005

 Mobiles save people living in rural communities the financial costs and time involved
with travel. As a result, 85 percent of people in Tanzania and 79 percent in South
Africa said they had greater contact and improved relationships with families and
friends as a result of mobile phones
 62 percent of small businesses in South Africa and 59 percent in Egypt said they had
increased their profits as a result of mobile phones, in spite of increased call costs

 Over 85 percent of small businesses run by black individuals in South Africa rely
solely on a mobile phone for telecommunications The results of this study suggest
that growth in the African telecom market will continue to pay off African economies .

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Experiences in India:

A group of ladies in Kizhur village, Pondicherry decided that they wanted to start a small
business enterprise manufacturing incense sticks. They began as sub-contractors but their
confidence and enterprise grew from utilizing the local telecentre. As a result of some
searches by the telecentre operators, they were able to develop the necessary skills for
packaging and marketing their own brand name incense. The ladies were quickly able to
develop local outlets for their products and they are confidently using the telecentre to seek
out more distant customers.

The fishing industry in the northern part of Kerala state, in southern India has become an
example, of how simple tools of information exchange can drive value for all market
participants in a real world situation. Previously in Kerala, fishermen would bring their catch
to markets closest to their homes. The result was that some regional markets had abundant
supplies of fish at rock-bottom prices, while others had more demand and higher prices. That
began to change in 1997 when fishermen began acquiring cell phones. After they brought in
their day’s catch, they called other coastal markets to determine which had the best prices.
Once a critical mass of fishermen with access to market information was reached, average
prices realized by the fisherman increased 8 percent (a gain which paid for the cell phone
and the service just two months after purchase), while average prices paid by consumers fell
4 percent. Everybody benefits from efficient markets!

In the article ‘Poverty alleviation programmes in India: A social audit’, Mr. C.A.K.
Yesudian of Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India observes

Involvement of the local communities is key to the success of poverty alleviation

programmes. In the absence of community involvement, the programmes are plagued with
bureaucratic muddle and corruption at every level. Wage employment is an example to show
how too much of administrative interference has led to underutilization of funds, high
administrative cost, corruption and poor employment generation. Contrary to the wage
employment programme, self-employment programmes like microcredit is successful
because of people’s participation in the form of SHGs.

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Experiences in Banladesh:

Grameen Phone:

 CellBazaar, an innovative market-access service from Grameenphone Ltd.

Grameenphone CellBazaar is a user-generated market, accessible via mobile phone
or computers in Bangladesh. It is a low cost, pay-as-you-use service where users pay
the standard SMS or GPRS charges for accessing the service. There are no monthly
or posting fees.

Health Line:

 The HealthLine Service is an interactive teleconference between a GP caller seeking

health- related advice or consultation and a licensed physician who would be
available on a 24 hours a day and 7 days a week basis, to receive such calls. This
effort of GrameenPhone is primarily intended to enhance the health consciousness of
an individual by making a few categories of health information and medical services
readily available to him over a phone call.

Some of the services initially available under this program include: Information on
Doctor and Medical Facilities; Information on Drug or Pharmacy; Information on
Laboratory Test Report (interpretation); Medical Advice/ Consultation from Doctor (for
registered subscribers); and Help and advice during Medical Emergency.

Metric Consultancy Ltd

91, Florida Estate, Keshav Nagar, Mundhava Pune 411036

T: +91 (020) 3047 3400 E: Anand.karandikar@metricglobal.com

www.metricglobal.com

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