It’s Budget Day today. The honourable Finance Minister of India will table the Budget and its recommendations in the House of Parliament, even as you finish reading this. As we take the usual approach to Budget 2021 with demands of every kind, I have hopes of my own and want to walk you through rural India and its needs. Maybe not its wants. Most certainly not its desires. And definitely not its aspirations. I am going to just take you through five things we must not do to rural India, come what may. Businesses and marketers typically see the rural opportunity as the biggest one to tap.
There is always a clamour for sops to be able to penetrate rural India and percolate every urban product and service into the gut of our mother market. If Budget 2021 fulfils these ambitions of mine, or for that matter accepts it as an ethos of development as we want it to be, I will be the happiest of them all.
Five things we must do in and for rural markets:
1. Preserve what is left of good rural practice the way it is: Rural is really not a geography. Instead, it is a way of life practiced by millions. In many ways it involves a lot. A little that urban folk think is good and a lot that they think is bad. I really wish we would stop passing value judgements of good and bad, and instead try to preserve a lot of rural practice the way it is. There is a lot of merit in it. Merit that we seldom see through the tinted urban lenses that lots of us marketers, business folk and urban people wear. Outdoor defecation in the fields, the ability to feel comfortable in clothes that fit loosely and look plain, the ability to live in the same clothes for days on end and lots more are habits frowned upon.
Let’s list out all the frown-factors of rural people and their usage, attitude and habits, and do an audit as to what is bias and what is positive-think. We just might surprise ourselves and our biased orientations.
I ran a qualitative exercise on a set of urban educated and urban-lived set of bankers. A total sample of 205. I then got together an exhaustive list of 42 dominant “frown-factors” of rural lives. When I actually got them to do a neutral audit on it with reality factors outweighing negative biases, only three of the 42 swam. The rest sunk in the mire of our biases. Let’s think our biases out. Let’s help preserve rural practice that is good for all.
2. Create positive distribution networks that involve rural folk: This is a big need. The rural hinterland of India is huge. We are talking of 6,43,700 villages at last count, dispersed across a terrain of 29,80,489 square km. The rural Indian’s wants and needs are as deep and wide as that of the urban person’s. There is a deep need to spread every positive product and service to rural India. The best efforts to date have still kept a big chunk of the rural consumer dispossessed, as far as the goodies of modern life is concerned.
A great way to reach out to the entire set of people out there is to empower rural folk in the distribution chain by literally insisting on a distribution system and network that involves rural folk in every link of the chain. This will really help create positive job-networks for people in the thousands of towns and villages. The ability to work locally and get back home in the evening to enjoy their litti chokha made by mom or dad is a great thing to make happen. It’s time to create and invest in local networks of sales-folk from the realms of the rural masses, all waiting to embrace a livelihood in a sector outside of agriculture, which is a struggle by itself.
3. Help rural folk monetise idle-time: An idle-time study carried out by me in 87 rural clusters in India indicates gory numbers. A rural man is under-employed by far. On an average day, the man is gainfully employed for only as many as 2 hours and 20 minutes. A woman on the other hand is gainfully employed (and this includes housework) for 1 hour and 58 minutes. The rest of otherwise considered productive time is really idle-time.
Not crazily so, this idle time is really the time of idle gossip, idle and unproductive politics, and idle and kill-the-time oriented digital involvements such as Instagram Reels, Facebook and every other Tiktok clone app today. We need to really think of ways and means to tap this huge idle-time market and get it onto creative and positive pursuit. It need not be the pursuit of wealth, but it needs to certainly be the pursuit of happiness at least.
4. Help knit rural market output to global market needs, wants, desires and aspirations: There is a huge issue of a rude and cruel disconnect between the excellent products rural India produces as handmade, close-to-nature and passion-made, and front-ended market and marketing connect. What rural India produces has relevance to the new need of a new world in the global developed and supra-developed markets today. We need to help establish new market linkages on this count. Let’s connect the dots.
5. Help build pride in rural as the way to be: There is a big marketing campaign possible on this count. We need to get going on this. Desi pride is a movement in itself. There is a re-invigorated “Desi Gabru” movement in many parts of rural India led by Punjab and Haryana. Time to take this mainstream. Maybe a Government of India-led initiative? In the beginning, all of us are rural in our usage, attitude and consumption patterns. And in the end, we are rural as well. Let’s recognise this with pride, shall we now?
Harish bijoor (harishbijoor@hotmail.com)
Brand Guru & Founder, Harish Bijoor Consults