‘e-farmers’ is ITC credo

MARKING a departure from the practice of giving a picture of the core businesses of the company, with plans and prospects for the future, the ITC Chairman, Mr. Y. C. Deveshwar today spoke to shareholders at the company’s 91^st AGM almost entirely on the new "inspirational" agenda of the company. That is, ITC is to make serious efforts to bring about a "transformational change in rural India" through the already launched e-choupal initiative to empower the farmer.

Mr. Deveshwar announced that the company’s objective was to create a low-cost IT-based interactive transaction and fulfilment channel to cover one lakh villages, reaching out to a million farmers, over the next decade. He said ITC’s e-choupal model creatively and innovatively used information technology to deliver real time information and customised knowledge to the farmer, helping him to align his agricultural output on market demand and better price through improved quality and higher productivity.

Admitting that the task of economic uplift of rural India was a stupendous one, Mr. Deveshwar said many more corporates had to contribute their mite to supplement Government effort. The Central and State Governments could also play a catalytic role by creating a nurturing policy framework, he pointed out.

Underlining the other facets of ITC’s rural partnership, Mr Deveshwar disclosed that under the company’s pioneering farm forestry programme, 14 million high yielding disease-resistant clonal saplings had so far been planted over 8,400 hectares in Andhra Pradesh. Between the company’s farm forestry and social farm forestry programmes, 50,000 hectares of wasteland would be brought back to productive use over the next 10 years, providing direct employment to 50,000 households and benefiting another 30,000 households through indirect employment.

These forestry programmes, according to him, were bringing substantial tracts of degraded private land into productive use, and creating unemployment for the weakest sections of rural India, while securing a sustainable competitive source of wood-based materials.

Pointing out that this was the largest Internet-based intervention in rural India by a corporate house, he said the movement was now reaching out to 6,50,000 farmers cultivating four crops in 6,000 villages through 1,020 kiosks. The crops so far covered were soya, coffee, wheat and aquaculture, and the State covered are Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka. "The e-choupal initiative is a powerful illustration of the potential of IT to transform rural economics, notwithstanding the structure and size of land holdings in India."

Mr Deveshwar said the e-initiative, which facilitates a direct marketing channel in competition with the existing mandi system, was also in conformity with the reforms recommended by the Shankarlal Guru Committee appointed by the Union Agriculture Ministry. Besides including efficiency of the mandi channel through competition, this alternative channel, according to Mr Deveshwar, would also serve to conserve public resources that would otherwise be required for the expansion and upgradation of the mandi infrastructure.