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In their essay, C.K. Prahalad and Stuart L. Hart have rightly made this observation that Raising the Bottom of the Pyramid. Creating a consumer market for the 700,000 odd villages in India will help in the advancement of the overall economy of the nation, and also provide the rural population with those products and services that have been eluding them for decades.

Thanks to the economic liberalisation initiated during the early nineties, Indian companies have woken up to the truth of creating a consumer market for the rural poor. Shampoos and lozenges in small sachets are today made affordable for the rural poor. Other sectors have also realised this fact and have begun taking into account the rural families while designing their products. Still, the potential of the Indian rural economy, which holds more than 60% of the country’s disposable income has not been fully tapped.

Entrepreneurs, who could blend the two diametrically opposite aspects - social objectives with strong business methodology are the need of the hour. TARAhaat has strong social responsibilities and it merges them with its business concerns. TARAhaat targets the under-served markets in India with around 900 million people spread over villages, mandi towns and small cities.

September 2000 witnessed TARAhaat launching a unique ICT enabled, franchise-driven business model in three districts of the Bundelkhand region in central India. These TARAkendras are being developed as stand-alone cyber community-cum-business centres.

During the months of field-testing in Bundelkhand and later in Bhatinda, the demand for services has validated the business model of TARAhaat. There is demand for on and off-line information, e-governance, e-commerce, education and other services and products. This validation of TARAhaat’s business model has made it confident to tread this innovative path to becoming a strong, economically viable and financially independent institution impacting the large base of Indian population living outside the cities. TARAhaat’s business model received further recognition when it won The Stockholm Challenge Award 2001 in the Global Village category. The Stockholm Challenge Award is considered worldwide as the premier recognition for alternative IT society.

Computer literacy was one of the demands that surfaced early for which customers demonstrated a willingness to pay. Accordingly, TARAhaat developed a series of basic and more advanced IT training courses in Hindi and Punjabi that could be delivered through a single stand-alone Kendra as effectively as through a network of Kendras.

The IT courses have been set into the working rhythm of a typical Kendra and iterative changes, based on customer feedback, shall be made to maintain them. Rural customers pay for these courses, which reflects their market value and confirms the effectiveness of TARAhaat’s approach in evolving more marketable products and services. Though initial success was achieved through cutting across language barriers, future work involves weaving task-oriented learning systems and linking the operation to sources of employment, including self-employment. TARAhaat knows very well that education is the prerequisite for a sustainable livelihood. This knowledge has led to the decision to design and deliver an online academy.

The network of TARAkendras will shortly, play a role in reducing the frictional losses now being incurred by the rural and peri-urban people in accessing routine government services. TARAhaat is in the process of working closely with local administration to deliver such services on a commercial basis. This would, in turn, make the TARAkendras an aggregator and a viable means to reduce the overall costs currently involved in obtaining a government related result.

Also in the pipeline is an effective system to fix an appointment with and get affordable medical opinion from medical professionals anywhere in the world. This service will be extended to other sectors as well.

TARAhaat had its own set of problems when it set the ball rolling in the year 2000. When it comes to rural ICT projects for development, an Indian language interface is non-negotiable. Support for Indian languages on both NT and Linux platforms is poor. Further, licensing for Windows, proprietary software and language technologies are expensive enough to make TARAhaat’s business model non-sustainable, thus enervating the very purpose of TARAhaat.

In association with its technology partner Mahiti Infotech Private Limited, TARAhaat is in the process of building an open source (General Public License), free-ware Java applet, which will serve as a multi-platform, multilingual Input/Output interface for web applications in Indian languages. This applet is expected to provide a fool-proof method to translate font-code and Unicode.

Also being developed is a WYSIWYG HTML editor using the base applet that will support four methods of data entry (on-screen keyboard, phonetic, ISCII and typewriter). This HTML editor is being designed to support all parameters of fonts, paragraphs, images, bullets, numbers and table tags.

Software is required at three levels of operations: Kendra level, Regional Office level and TARAhaat Head Office level. Software has been chosen to allow for scalability of operations, security and mobile use enhancements.

The messaging and Indian language software have been chosen for its ease of use and convenience — the software provides an easy way to enter text in all Indian languages and ensures that the first time user can begin using the application very quickly. It also allows for the Indian languages content/data to be searched, indexed, sorted and queried on. The data is also compatible with other ISCII/Unicode based applications.

Zope, the leading Open Source web application server, enables to collaborate in the creation and management of dynamic web-based business applications such as intranet and portals. Zope makes it easy to build features such as site search, news, personalization, and e-commerce into your web applications. It provides top-notch access to databases and other legacy data. It also consists of a number of components, which work together to provide a complete yet flexible application server package.

The offline e-mail client has been developed by Mithi Technologies of Pune, one of TARAhaat’s partners. It can be used to send and receive email in 11 Indian languages and English.

India Interactive, another Mithi product, is a set of tools and components, which allows to incorporate Indian languages into web or desktop application. It comes with COM and ActiveX components with documented Interfaces for conversion and rendering. It is a tried and tested stable platform, which is used as the foundation for all of Mithi’s products i.e. LEAP, MailJol, MailJol Unplugged, IndiaPage and Mithi Enterprise Messaging. IndiaInteractive follows the globally practiced Resident Component Architecture to improve response while working, and to provide a rich unlimited experience to user.

The integration of Zope with the Mithi Application Server resulted in the creation of the multilingual website, www.tarahaat.com and an e-mail engine that would support 11 Indian languages. Both Zope and the Mithi Application Server are platform independent, helping to work on Linux, an open source.

The e-mail engine supports phonetic, typewriter, inscript, and onscreen keyboard while composing the mail. A person who is not familiar with the language keyboard can use TARAdak to send messages in any of the Indian languages, thus standardising the entire rural market.

TARAhaat’s current business strategy is to continue to build its inventory of content, products and services, based on consumer feed back, to ensure that each franchise can become profitable in the shortest possible time. But, before embarking on a national roll out of its franchise driven business model, TARAhaat must demonstrate rigorous proof of concept. We believes that this could be best achieved by carefully designed expansion of the franchsed network, thus generating substantial activity at the ground level to demonstrate both the consumer demand as well as viability of the franchisee as a stand-alone business. q

Get a New Communication Culture

Overlooking the strategic impact of the web is a huge mistake. To treat the Web as if it were an on-line brochure and manage it out of the operations department, could be disastrous. The web should be considered one of the most important determinants for the way you will do business in the future.

The internal communication component needs to be managed very differently from the external communication component. The key difference is that the former is more inward looking and represents your organization's in-house flows, while the latter is what you need to project to the outside world. These days it is not enough to do great communication work with the outside world. We also need to prove it to people in-house who may not intuitively understand the value of what we accomplish in order to help our organization succeed.

How Do You Prove that Internal Communication Helps Drive the Overall Communication Goals? Measure It!

n	Connect communication activities with project results and income generating means for the organization.
n	Set measurable communication objectives that are aligned with organizational goals, i.e. ways that the communication work done in the organization measures up directly or indirectly with its mandate.
n	Identify specific measurement approaches to use in different situations, including objective analysis, benchmarking, interviews, focus groups or surveys.
n	Translate qualitative findings into more concrete reports that capture the management’s attention.
n	One way to start developing an integrated communications strategy is to look at the nature of the different kinds of work the team will be doing and what kind of communication is needed to support that work.

Communication messages do not operate in a vacuum. Your organization must commit to reinforce the perceptions conveyed by the communication message. It must be built to last. While the message should present you in the most positive light, in the long run it is counter-productive to oversell or over-promise.

Integrated communication strategy

In the past, DA has had many communication successes but has not aggressively promoted its image. Now, in a highly competitive environment where "getting on the front page" matters, DA decided to reorient its communication work - communication and advocacy must become a key component of all DA activities, both to raise the profile of DA and also of sustainable development issues in specific.

This needed the complete buy in from all of its professional strength in-house. Consequently, an internal news bulletin is distributed every month and will soon be made available on the internal web pages. Material from this is used as the basis for compiling some external news articles. A content management system being developed in-house which will now allow the professionals to update their subject specific sections online (subject to editing by the content manager). The Communications Coordinator and the Library Coordinator maintain close contact with the various Project Managers, communicating at least weekly via email or telephone. Each produces a short monthly text showing progress against deliverables, which will feed into the institutional memory of the organization. In addition, the management has made a provision for all the professionals to meet on every Saturday to discuss and document their work and experiences. (see box below)

Document templates are provided for on the intranet to document the weekly staff meetings. This is to ensure that all DA documents have a similar format and the people who work at the grassroots level get to convey the "real thing" to the outside world.

Getting it up the first time is one thing, keeping it up to date is another! q

Ambika Sharma