Basic Needs Fulfilment in the Blue Economy:
Potential to Change India’s Future

There are 1.2 billion people in the world trapped in extreme poverty and survive on less than $1 a day. A third of them live in India. For most of these individuals, their plight is an outcome of inadequacy in enabling factors – institutional and market based – that enhance access to goods and services. While there are many ways to address these challenges, solutions directly linking people with sustainable livelihoods in the rural economy appear to be the most impactful ones. Such solutions are intrinsically complex and place emphasis on the need for change in processes to be systemic in nature.

If looked at from a broader frame of sustainability, India, as most other countries, needs communities that are significantly more resilient, with less dependence on externally sourced products and services for basic needs fulfilment. It is therefore, imperative that change in this direction be driven through new business models with distributed epicentres of local value creation through the regeneration of resources, access to energy, right-sized technology and skilled human resources. This needs innovation at system levels higher than that of simple products and services. Hence, Technology and Action for Rural Advancement (TARA) focusses on the incubation of social equity enabled, commercially sustainable, entrepreneurial value chains for last mile delivery of basic needs products and services for the poor.

The private sector will, undoubtedly, lead our drive towards ‘fulfilment’ of basic needs and would want to profit from the effort; but it must now do so in a different way. Supply chains that transport finished products across vast distances and through a large number of intermediaries are more than likely to get stretched and eventually broken. Businesses of the future will therefore be compelled to market goods and services through franchisee networks that empower the micro and small-scale service providers to create value locally by processing a diverse range of resources into useful products that fulfil basic needs. Large corporations could use their access to cutting edge research on materials and processes to put together ‘enterprise-in-a-box’ packages of technology and know-how for local entrepreneurs; adding a few critical inputs to secure their own revenues on a recurring and long-term basis.

To re-state what must be obvious by now – technology is the key. In the uphill task of building a new, truly blue, rural economy; IT enabled services and mobile commerce in particular are potential game changers in the creation of sustainable livelihoods. India’s new internet users are skipping hardwire connections and accessing the internet in a ‘mobile-first’ capacity on their phones in rural India. All that is required are appropriate and affordable business models that can enhance access for the consumers and drive efficiencies in the supply chain, particularly at the customer interface for effective delivery of services and fail-safe revenue management.

The Development Alternatives (DA) Group plays a pivotal role in establishing multi-entity institutional eco-systems that cut across civil society, business, academia and government. With our network partners, TARA, the social enterprise wing of the DA group is committed to delivering game-changing development solutions at scale in key sectors such as renewable energy, water and sanitation, waste management and affordable housing. We look forward to even greater collaboration in the future on systems that drive large scale change, particularly in terms of how critically needed investment from pools of capital can be drawn into disaggregated business models, along with required changes in the policy environment.  q