A strategic component of the India’s National eGovernance Plan consists of setting up Common Services Centers (CSCs). These centers are ICT enabled front end service delivery points at the village level for the delivery of government, financial, social and private sector services in the areas of agriculture, health, education, entertainment, consumer products, banking, insurance, pension, utility payments, and more. The CSC project has been implemented in a public private partnership framework with a focus on rural entrepreneurship & market mechanisms. 100,000 such centers have already been set up and the government plans to add another 90,000 by the end of Q1 2016
E-commerce players usch Flipkart, Snapdeal, Infibeam and Paytm now intend to reach remote areas of the country with the delivery and other services. India’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology wants to connect e-commerce companies with its common service centers in villages to not only help CSCs earn revenue but also generate employment by facilitating development of ancillary industries such as handicrafts, textiles, and others.
Rural India is a large untapped market for consumer and electronics goods for e-commerce. According to a report by AC Nielsen, the consumer sector in rural and semi-urban India will cross $20 billion by 2018 and reach $100 billion by 2025. Many other reports suggest that items such as refrigerators and consumer electronic goods will witness demand growth as the government is investing heavily in rural electrification, reports Business Standard.
For Paytm, an Indian e-commerce shopping company, CSCs provide an opportunity to recruit bankers in villages and use these centers as payment banks. “The payment bank is going to be one of the initiatives to make sure that villages get quality banking service. We will recruit people from villages to be part of our payment banking teams. They would represent us in rural areas. In fact, what we see is a new level of service where people can request an agent in the vicinity to come and provide banking services at their doorstep,” said Kshitij Sanghi, vice president, Paytm.
A senior executive of Snapdeal, another e-commerce site, said that they had initiated a pilot project to upgrade the skills sets of rural Indians manning the e-commerce hubs.
Neeru Sharma, co-founder of Infibeam, another online retailer, said, “We have a dedicated customer service team which is training village level entrepreneurs to setup their own stores, list them on different marketplaces at differential pricing. We are also fixing the end supply chain for them.”
