The Hindu Business Line : Empowering rural India

Three news items, which I read recently, gladdened my heart as all of them emphasise the importance of training rural youth to tap the huge rural market. Addressing a global logistics summit at Hyderabad recently, the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, appealed to B-schools to develop an Indian paradigm of management education based on local social and cultural attributes to really transform rural areas.

Another news item said that ICFAI National College that offers business management programme for the masses is churning out foot soldiers for financial services and retail companies who are looking at hiring B-school graduates for their Tier II and rural operations.

Confirming this is another piece of news that ICICI Bank has decided to recruit graduates from small towns and villages who have a government school background. The fast growing bank is recruiting over 100,000 people every year. ICICI Bank's strategy is in tune with the company's fast changing profile, as it is now expanding its network in semi-urban and rural areas.

The strategy is to recruit people from humble backgrounds and polish them through training. This strategy would not only help in containing the attrition rate, but will also help in absorbing unemployed educated youth from semi-urban and rural areas.

Lason India, a BPO set-up, launched the first ever rural BPO called Chida Soft, located in Kizhanur village of Tiruvallur District in Tamil Nadu, employing 14 unemployed graduate girls from the village — an experiment which is proving to be successful.

`Youth 4 Jobs' is a rural retail academy and vocational training initiative of the Andhra Pradesh Government with an `employment generation and marketing mission'. It has been started with the philosophy that the most sustainable livelihood option is to provide jobs for youth by giving them market relevant skills in markets where recruiting such youth as a value proportion makes sense.

The first batch of 700 rural youths have graduated with 90 per cent placement (with 40 per cent of them being women) in well-known retailers such as Future Group, McDonalds, FoodWorld, Spencers and Reliance.

If more corporates follow the ICICI and Lason India example, it is sure to help the rural economy.

Because these rural youth are based in villages or small towns when they begin to earn decent salaries from corporates, they will find that their real income is more than what they will get in bigger cities where the cost of living is higher resulting in no or little saving to send back home. This will also reduce the burden on bigger cities, which are bursting at the seams, unable to improve the infrastructure required to cope with the influx of thousands of people flocking to the cities in search of jobs. Many of them are unemployed because of their poor communication skills in English, both written and spoken. So hordes of them land up in jobs far below their expectations, leading to frustration and growing criminalisation in the bigger cities.

I see a big future for rural India if more and more second run management institutes offer full-time courses in rural marketing (instead of making it just an elective course) which trains people to suit the requirement of corporates who are making a beeline to rural India to exploit its huge potential.

Many of these rural youths are bright, with native intelligence that can be effectively channelised by the corporates to achieve their targets in rural India. Besides, these youths will not be as expensive as city-bred youngsters whose expectations have skyrocketed because of the lucrative salaries offered by the BPOs and the IT sector.

Due to lack of committed people who are willing to soil their feet in the dusty hinterland, many rural initiatives are aborted or forever remain in the pilot stage, rarely scaled up. The situation is bound to change if corporates recruit youths from small towns, which in turn should not only help them, but also help the rural economy prosper.

(The writer is CMD, Anugrah Madison Advertising Pvt Ltd and President, Rural Marketing Agencies Association of India)

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