Word: ruralism
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...perennial problems of marketing in India: How do you reach the 700 million people living in rural areas who, though poor, would still add up to a big chunk of change if they only knew about your products? That's something Satyan Mishra, 33, has spent a lot of time thinking about. Mishra is the founder and CEO of Drishtee, a six-year-old company dedicated to making services and goods found in cities available to country folk...
...Drishtee's early years, the company focused on connecting government departments to villages. Using small kiosks outfitted with a computer hooked up to an intranet, it allowed rural dwellers to apply for a driver's license or request a copy of a birth certificate online. The company charged a small fee--25 rupees, or 55¢, to apply for a driver's license, say--but the applicant saved 10 times that amount by reducing the number of visits to a government office in an often distant regional center. The system worked well at first. "But we discovered that there...
...kiosk package--computer, digital camera, Internet connection over a cell-phone line, and printer--is $1,500, which is paid back over a few years. Each entrepreneur also pays a fixed monthly fee of $11. For that, there is help if anything goes wrong with the hardware, special rural-focused online packages that Drishtee develops (like the matchmaking service) and regular visits from insurance-company reps. Drishtee and each village entrepreneur get a small cut for every new policy sold. Drishtee is also looking at cell-phone kiosks--essentially cell phones that will offer about half the services currently provided...
...shabby T-shirt and flip-flops, Peter Ndivo looks an unlikely combatant in a battle with environmentalists thousands of miles away. Yet, Ndivo's three-acre farm in rural Kenya is in the front line of a dispute that pitches eco-minded Western consumers against poor African communities: The consumers, concerned by the global-warming effect of burning jet fuel to fly produce from distant lands to European supermarkets, are pressing supermarkets to curb such imports; the farmers see flying fashionable baby aubergines and mange tout peas to Europe as their ticket out of poverty...
...many ways the declaration of an emergency plays into the militants' hands. Pakistan's army and intelligence forces must now devote time, energy and resources to stamping out opposition protests in the cities rather than fighting militants in their rural redoubts. With the majority of Pakistanis opposed to Musharraf, the government's struggle to establish control in places like the traditionally moderate Swat Valley, where an Islamist militia is waging a bloody campaign to establish Shari'a law, will become even harder. "Pakistan is very religious, but it is not extremist," says Ahsan Iqbal, information secretary for the Pakistan Muslim...