ITC : e-Choupal : Let's put India first

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	ABHISHEK JAIN Soya Farmer & e-Choupal Sanchalak Dahod Village, Raisen District, Madhya Pradesh

Before ITC introduced us to e-Choupal, we were restricted to selling our produce in the local mandi. We had to go through middlemen and prices were low. ITC trained me to manage the Internet kiosk and I became the e-Choupal Sanchalak in my village. Today we are a community of e-farmers with access to daily prices of a variety of crops in India and abroad – this helps us to get the best price. We can also find out about many other important things – weather forecasts, the latest farming techniques, crop insurance, etc. e-Choupal has not only changed the quality of our lives, but our entire outlook.

e-Choupal	Now	Next 5 Years
States covered	10	15
Villages covered	40,000	100,000
No. of e-Choupals	6,500	20,000
Farmers e-empowered	4 million	10 million

A powerful illustration of corporate strategy linking business purpose to larger societal purpose, e-Choupal leverages the Internet to empower small and marginal farmers – who constitute a majority of the 75% of the population below the poverty line.

By providing them with farming know-how and services, timely and relevant weather information, transparent price discovery and access to wider markets, e-Choupal enabled economic capacity to proliferate at the base of the rural economy.

Today 4 million farmers use e-Choupal to advantage – bargaining as virtual buyers’ co-operatives, adopting best practices, matching up to food safety norms. Being linked to futures markets is helping small farmers to better manage risk. e-Choupal has been specially cited in the Government of India’s Economic Survey of 2006-07, for its transformational impact on rural lives.

ITC’s strategic intent is to develop e-Choupal as a significant two-way multidimensional delivery channel, efficiently carrying goods and services out of and into rural India. By progressively linking the digital infrastructure to a physical network of rural business hubs and agro-extension services, ITC is transforming the way farmers do business, and the way rural markets work.

The network of 6,500 e-Choupal centres spread across 40,000 villages has emerged as the gateway of an expanding spectrum of commodities leaving farms – wheat, rice, pulses, soya, maize, spices, coffee, aqua-products. The reverse flow carries FMCG, durables, automotives, banking and insurance services back to villages. e-Choupal is one of the top five alternative channels for LIC Policy sales, and accounts for 10% of the national weather insurance market.

ABHISHEK JAIN