Project Shakti and ITC e-choupal

I’ve been wanting to write this since long but I haven’t been able to find a lot of proof about the facts that I’m to pen down right now…

During my graduation I did a rural market survey on FMCG products and stuff like that. It was more like a formality to be completed, but since my group was one excited lot, we went to somewhere close to a thousand different households and asked about their lifestyle and got questionnaires filled. It was like a weeklong trip to the insides of small villages where the population is not more than 2000.

In the process of getting questionnaires filled and going from one household to another, I became extremely interested in the rural markets, and the consumer behavior of these people. We used to travel in an SUV that we’d hired for a week. And the very fact that people used to start peeking out of their households when they saw an SUV coming gave us the feeling that their life was so rigidly and extremely simple, that even a car filled with 6 students is enough to generate curiosity amongst the village people.

Many thought that we were there to sell something, and before we opened our mouths they used to tell us, “nahi nahi… kuch nahi chahiye” and rushed to close their front doors. But we had to knock back and tell them that we are here to ask a few questions and not sell anything. And a response to that would usually be a question like… are you from the population survey? After getting all these issues sorted out, we would get down to making them answer the questions in the questionnaires.

And most often than not, if the questionnaire was being answered by the mother or father, they used to call their children to respond to the questions, especially for soaps and shampoos. This again was pretty fascinating since the toddlers popped brand names like crazy. They precisely knew which actress endorsed which brand and how it smelled and all that. Usually the mom would end up saying that she sometimes let the children handle which soap to buy and which shampoo to buy. Sure they had their preferences, but kids were the biggest lot who were open to trying new brands.

So the scene was something like, the elderly male usually remained aloof from all this decision making. Give him a Lifebuoy anyday and he’ll be happy. The elder female made decisions with regards to washing soaps and salt (in fact most women didn’t buy branded salt since they had this myth that since branded salt was whiter than the normal one, it had more harmful chemicals), and many a times, the kids made decisions on which soap to buy.

In fact at some houses there were 2 different soaps being used. The locally made soap was used by the elders and branded ones by the kids. But in all cases, kids were much more receptive to brands, and much better risk-takers than the rest.

Now, moving away from the questionnaire part, we went back and started hunting for previous research to support our research. In the process we came across ‘Project Shakti’ and ‘e-choupal’, two concepts headed by 2 of the biggest consumable marketers of India, HLL or Uniliver and ITC respectively.

But what was even more surprising was that out of all the districts that we went to in the ahmedabad vicinity, no-where did we find an instance of either Project Shakti or ITC’s e-choupal. Maybe because of the fact that we had taken convenience sampling. But I also remember that we used to take permission from every village’s Sarpanch before we went ahead and did our survey. And none of the Sarpanch’s also talked about these 2 initiatives while briefing us.

When I went for my post grad @ SP Jain Dubai | Singapore, I came across cases on ITC e-choupal, and Project Shakti on a frequent basis. CK Prahalad in his book, Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid also talked about ITC e-choupal, and I was pretty impressed about it.

I worked out some costings, and found that even though the installation cost for an e-choupal was considerably high, the returns it gave were able to recover the costs of the installation in just a year’s time. Just a year’s harvesting was all that was required to recover the costs. At that rate, I felt essentially ITC’s e-choupal should be running in full gear and must be getting implemented at various places simultaneously. But I never heard news about its progress. While it’s a pure success in the case studies, it really doesn’t seem to be the case in reality. I couldn’t confirm it completely. But even the supply chain professors who came to teach said that the situation has become more like ‘all fart and no shit’… which only leads us to the point that companies are probably not willing to commit to large amounts of money to an initiative like e-choupal. The technology and the infrastructure might be available, but trust between the corporations and BoP people still doesn’t seem to have been established to make e-choupal a success.

Same applies for Project Shakti. Unilever made a smart move to position Project Shakti as a CSR kinda initiative from the very beginning. So even if the project bombed, it wouldn’t be called as a failure. And the project did bomb. Thus, Project Shakti does still remain very much a CSR initiative.

Sad no?!