From Gatekeeping to Network Orchestration: The Way-forward for “Free Basics” and Such…

Isn’t it better for the unconnected poor to access directed Internet for free rather than have no access to the Net at all? Is the outcry against Internet.org (since renamed “Free Basics”) just an ideologically purist position, or will the initiative actually fracture the Internet? Should one move beyond this debate of “whether it will serve the intended purpose” to “what will make it work”?

Outcry against Internet.org

“Can the electricity provider decide which brand of refrigerator you will buy?” thundered a friend, the other day! “Telecom carriers are utility, they can’t take away the consumer right to choose which sites they want on the Net”, she argued. “Content provider paying termination charges is a much surer way for the telcos to monetize Internet usage, than getting the consumers to pay for the bandwidth. Therefore the garb of philanthropy”.  “We can’t let much of the Internet become a Private App Store; there are neutral ways of providing free Internet”.

To be fair, Facebook said…

“…because local carriers can’t afford to offer free Internet access, the program is designed only to serve as an onramp for users to the broader Internet.” “Internet.org is not a gatekeeper and is open to all developers: The platform is an open program that lets developers easily create services and gives people choice over the free basic services they can use.”

Everyone agrees there’s a need to expand the Net access

Despite the recent rise in mobile usage, India and other emerging economies lag way behind in the penetration of Internet usage. Any initiative to lower the cost of Internet and the cost of accessing relevant content is of great value. Digital connectivity empowers people, especially those at the margin, in enhancing their livelihoods.

However, principles of net neutrality must not be compromised while expanding access to the Internet.

There is, in fact, a bigger context that demands broadening the scope of “basic” services.
Imperative of building meta-markets for the poor, and the need for an orchestrator
Information was, is, and will be power!  Only more so in a hyper-connected knowledge economy. Connectivity that provides access to information and know-how is indeed empowering for the poor. However, that is only one part of the orchestra. Poor’s ability to access physical markets for their production inputs and for selling output is also quite constrained. If the physical aspects are not solved for, information alone doesn’t help raise their incomes.

The ITC e-Choupal experience shows us the value of an end-to-end ecosystem and the importance of an orchestrator. Besides providing access to information and knowledge free of cost, ITC e-Choupal created a meta-market for physical and financial inputs to raise farm productivity, augment natural resources like water, supplement income through livestock development etc. and truly empowered the rural communities. And to close the loop, ITC set up an agri produce buying system in parallel, in competition with the other options available to the farmer.

Let a thousand flowers bloom!

To my mind, initiatives like Internet.org should expand the coalition of partners that will help in providing such end-to-end solutions in competition with other such coalitions. If multiple meta-markets become the new norm, and information and knowledge are made available free by everyone, continuous innovation will be spurred to design even better services for the benefit of the poor.
A responsible orchestrator dilutes its own inherent “gatekeeping” power by creating a reciprocal dependency with the communities they serve. Where widening the provider choice helps the community, the revenue model of the orchestrator should be aligned with that structure; on the other hand, where an aggregated demand must be channelized to a few providers to make available the services otherwise unviable, the structure should be so.

The obligation of the Governments is to raise consumer awareness and foster competition
Connectivity brings a new responsibility with it. As societies get exposed to such a multitude of information, it would be important to also create awareness so that the poor are not exploited by unscrupulous operators. Otherwise whatever comes on the screen may become the gospel truth for the masses with low levels of literacy and education. These can lead to political and economic exploitation. The answer is not in controlling information but in multiplying awareness.

Governments must ensure that every meta-market conforms to the principles of neutrality and that they are not anti-competitive or market-distorting. Consumers should have the opportunity to decide the winners and losers in the market, no one else.

Food on Indian Railway Platforms: My Top Five

Just felt like listing the Top Five Food items I had enjoyed on Indian Railway Platforms over the years :)

What's yours?

The pics are not mine; just copied the closest looking from the Net...

5. Toast wrapped in Omelette, Nagpur (late 1990s)

 

4. Egg Roll in Howrah (mid 1980s)

 

3. Samosa in Nalgonda (early 1990s)

 

2. Egg Biryani on Konkan Railway (early 2000s)

 

 

1. Poori Aloo in Nandyal (mid 1970s)

 



Telangana: My 5-point Formula

In due course, once the President sends the proposal to the State, the Assembly can recommend the following!


1. Conduct a people's referendum in Telangana. If a large majority prefer splitting, go ahead and form a new state.

2. Since it makes sense geographically, keep Hyderabad in Telangana. Make it the joint capital for three years.

3. Pass on 13/23 share of revenues generated from Hyderabad to Seemandhra for the next ten years to build a new capital city; the Centre to contribute an equal amount.

4. A GoM can work out a fair formula for dividing other resources such as water and power.

5. Make usage of words like "settlers" a criminal offence. Every Indian citizen has equal rights all over India.

Hide and Seek

Excerpt from Lee Child's "61 Hours" (Jack Reacher 14)

Hide and seek. Maybe the oldest game in the world. Because of ancient thrills and fears buried deep in the back of every human's brain. Predator and prey. The irresistible shiver of delight, crouching in the dark, hearing the footsteps pass by. The rush of pleasure doubling back and wrenching open the closet door and discovering the victim. The instant translation of primeval terrors into modern day laughter.

Lessons of Liberalisation

Mr Parthasarathi Swami, the Managing Editor of Business India was writing a 'Business Travelogue' down the bylanes of two decades of India's liberalisation. I was among the several co-travellers he had asked for our thoughts on the "Lessons of Liberalisation". This is what I had said:

We have learnt:

• that markets freed from government controls can unleash entrepreneurial energies.

• that a calibrated speed of reform is more sustainable.

• that institutions (whether for regulation or development) need to be designed and strengthened before markets are allowed free play.

We haven't learnt:

• how to set up a speedier and efficient process of building consensus among political parties or between the Centre and the states.

The book has recently been published as "Boar in Boots". Do read it. It's written in a very interesting style! With contribution from over fifty CEOs...  

Dr Verghese Kurien - Inspiration to a Rural Manager

Replicating the Anand Pattern of Cooperatives, across India, under Operation Flood required a large number of suitably trained young people into their management cadres. The supply of graduates from India’s then existing schools of management was too small to fill this demand; in any case, very few of those graduates were motivated to work for cooperatives.

To serve this need, if Dr Kurien had simply chosen to expand the capacity of NDDB’s Management Training Cell and / or sponsor a Centre for Cooperative Management in one of the IIMs, my career would have moved along a different path. Instead he chose to set up the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA), visualizing the necessity of a new discipline called “rural management”. Till then, as a norm, “business” pre-fixed “management” and “development” suffixed “rural”!

To me, a firm believer in the power of “and” versus the tyranny of “or”, this new fusion concept appealed instantly, and I decided that IRMA would be the place for me as I finish my under-graduation the following year (1981). That even the first batch of IRMA didn’t graduate yet, or that the very discipline wasn’t defined well, added to the lure!        

In a 1980 seminal paper, titled “A New Institute of Rural Management – And a New Developmental Discipline?”, Dr Michael Halse, then a Food and Agriculture Organisation Advisor with the National Dairy Development Board wrote that “the rural manager’s tasks consist of dealing simultaneously with a series of interacting systems: (a) the social and institutional system whereby humans relate to each other, formally and informally; (b) the physical and technical systems, whereby man exists within the biosphere and practices agriculture in order to manipulate these systems to human advantage, and (c) the economic systems whereby humans exchange the fruits of each other’s labours and (if they are lucky) save and invest in order to improve their lives in future times.”

He argued that “the practice of rural management requires sensitivity to the priorities and needs of the society, dominated as it is by the culture of poverty.” “The study and teaching of rural management as a discipline must grasp, and adapt for its purposes, modern management’s observational skills, analytical techniques and decision making practices, applying them innovatively to the tasks of rural development and the elimination of rural poverty.”

I am sure, all that Dr Halse had to do, while writing this paper, was to reproduce Dr Kurien in action, into words…  

After passing out of IRMA in 1983, I joined Gujarat Cooperative Oilseeds Growers’ Federation (GROFED), promoted by NDDB under a project to restructure the oilseeds & edible oils sector  replicating the Anand Pattern of cooperatives.

After spending nearly seven years in GROFED, I came to the conclusion that Anand Pattern was not going to work in the oilseeds sector because the market dynamics were very different from those of milk. I moved out of the cooperative sector, and joined ITC which had just diversified into the branded edible oils business. Thereafter, I met Dr Kurien only occasionally during my infrequent visits to IRMA or NDDB; I was an “unwelcome guest”, having moved to the corporate sector…

Years later, with the conceptualisation of eChoupal within ITC, I became a “complete defector” because this model goes against two of the core tenets of the Anand Pattern viz. (1) farmer owned enterprise controlling the whole value chain, and (2) eliminating the middlemen to directly connect the farmer and the consumer.

ITC eChoupal is not owned by farmers in “form”, but, as an organization that can thrive only by being ultra-responsive to the farmers’ needs, it delivers similar outcomes for the farmers. And, that, without the limitations imposed by a typical “democracy in practice”! In fact, the eChoupal tag line “Kisano ke hith mein, kisano ka apnaa”, is inspired by Bhola’s (Naseeruddin Shah) dialogue from Manthan, “Yeh sisoty apdi cheh” (this is our society) 

ITC eChoupal does recognize that the middlemen are bad, but more importantly, also recognizes that they provide crucial linkages along the value chain in an economy where the required institutional infrastructure is absent. Leveraging the unique capabilities of these middlemen, yet disintermediating them from the transmission of information flow & market signals was at the core of eChoupal model that empowers the famers.

Two years after eChoupal was launched, I got a chance to meet Dr Kurien at an event in Delhi, where we were co-panelists, and I could share these perspectives with him. Not only did he appreciate the insights and the nuances of our business model, but he immediately allowed ITC eChoupal to recruit IRMA graduates from the campus, otherwise reserved for select partner organizations. 

A few more years later, in 2007, this news item in Business Standard marked a high point in my career as a rural manager: “Nandan Nilekani of Infosys and S Sivakumar of ITC rub shoulders with Mohammad Yunus and Verghese Kurien as messiahs of development in a new report on poverty alleviation penned by the World Bank” 

With the passing away of Dr Kurien yesterday, I lost a valued guru; but the spirit of his idea - ‘enterprise as a solution to poverty alleviation’ - remains an inspiration to me to innovate different institutional forms to suit diverse contexts of rural India.   

Process Orientation in Customer Service

Last evening I had an interesting experience as to what happens when the process orientation is blind in the context of customer service! This was on-board an Indigo flight.

Passenger next to me, traveling on a Corporate ticket, was entitled for one food and one beverage; he asked for a bottle of water and an apple juice. The cabin attendant refused to serve two beverages, because the entitlement is for one food and one beverage!

The harassed passenger eventually had no option but to settle for a sandwich along with the water bottle.

That costed Indigo a cool Rs 100 more (price difference between apple juice and sandwich), and left a customer totally dissatisfied!