Today’s Business Standard carries Rajesh Jain’s article on Transforming rural India, the hub way in which he discusses the RISC model.
Rural India needs affordable services – from education to market access, from telecom to healthcare, from financial intermediation to entertainment. The key issue in rural India is the non-availability of services at affordable prices. Linked to this is the lack of perceived opportunities in rural areas. These twin factors create a situation in which few want to do business in rural India.
It also leads to the exodus of people from rural areas to urban slums, which stretch the resources in the cities and towns even further. In other words, rural India is caught in a trap that it seems difficult to get out of.
… What Dey and Khosla propose is the creation of 5,000 rural hubs across India, each catering to a population of about 100,000 or about 100 villages, such that the hub is no more than a “bicycle-commute” distance away for people in the villages. These hubs will have about 10,000 square feet, built at a cost of about Rs 2 crore each. They will have state-of-the-art infrastructure – including 24×7 electricity, broadband connectivity, security and sanitation.
This standardised infrastructure reduces the costs of operation for service providers in rural India. From the point of view of the rural populace, there is one place where it can get multiple services – services which were hitherto not available or too expensive.
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 