Agriculture is vital to India. It produces 23% of GDP, feeds a billion people, and employs 66% of the workforce. Because of the Green Revolution, India’s agricultural productivity has improved to the point that it is both self-sufficient and a net exporter of a variety of food grains. Yet most Indian farmers have remained quite poor. The causes include remnants of scarcity-era regulation and an agricultural system based on small, inefficient landholdings. The agricultural system has traditionally been unfair to primary producers. Soybeans, for example, are an important oilseed crop that has been exempted from India’s Small Scale Industries Act to allow for processing in large, modern facilities. Yet 90% of the soybean crop is sold by farmers with small holdings to traders, who act as purchasing agents for buyers at a local, government-mandated marketplace, called a mandi. Farmers have only an approximate idea of price trends and have to accept the price offered them at auctions on the day that they bring their grain to the mandi. As a result, traders are well positioned to exploit both farmers and buyers through practices that sustain system-wide inefficiencies.

ITC is one of India’s leading private companies, with annual revenues of US$2 billion. Its International Business Division was created in 1990 as an agricultural trading company; it now generates US$150 million in revenues annually. The company has initiated an e-Choupal effort that places computers with Internet access in rural farming villages; the e-Choupals serve as both a social gathering place for exchange of information (choupal means gathering place in Hindi) and an e-commerce hub. What began as an effort to re-engineer the procurement process for soy, tobacco, wheat, shrimp, and other cropping systems in rural India has also created a highly profitable distribution and product design channel for the company—an e-commerce platform that is also a low-cost fulfillment system focused on the needs of rural India. The e-Choupal system has also catalyzed rural transformation that is helping to alleviate rural isolation, create more transparency for farmers, and improve their productivity and incomes. This case analyzes the e-Choupal initiative for soy; efforts in other cropping systems (coffee, wheat, and shrimp aquaculture), while different in detail, reflect the same general approach.

Business Model
A pure trading model does not require much capital investment. The e-Choupal model, in contrast, has required that ITC make significant investments to create and maintain its own IT network in rural India and to identify and train a local farmer to manage each e-Choupal. The computer, typically housed in the farmer’s house, is linked to the Internet via phone lines or, increasingly, by a VSAT connection, and serves an average of 600 farmers in 10 surrounding villages within about a five kilometer radius. Each e-Choupal costs between US$3,000 and US$6,000 to set up and about US$100 per year to maintain. Using the system costs farmers nothing, but the host farmer, called a sanchalak, incurs some operating costs and is obligated by a public oath to serve the entire community; the sanchalak benefits from increased prestige and a commission paid him for all e-Choupal transactions. The farmers can use the computer to access daily closing prices on local mandis, as well as to track global price trends or find information about new farming techniques—either directly or, because many farmers are illiterate, via the sanchalak. They also use the e-Choupal to order seed, fertilizer, and other products such as consumer goods from ITC or its partners, at prices lower than those available from village traders; the sanchalak typically aggregates the village demand for these products and transmits the order to an ITC representative. At harvest time, ITC offers to buy the crop directly from any farmer at the previous day’s closing price; the farmer then transports his crop to an ITC processing center, where the crop is weighed electronically and assessed for quality. The farmer is then paid for the crop and a transport fee. “Bonus points,” which are exchangeable for products that ITC sells, are given for crops with quality above the norm. In this way, the e-Choupal system bypasses the government-mandated trading mandis.

The e-Choupal model demonstrates that a large corporation can play a major role in recognizing markets and increasing the efficiency of an agricultural system, while doing so in ways that benefit farmers and rural communities as well as shareholders.

Farmers benefit from more accurate weighing, faster processing time, and prompt payment, and from access to a wide range of information, including accurate market price knowledge, and market trends, which help them decide when, where, and at what price to sell. Farmers selling directly to ITC through an e-Choupal typically receive a higher price for their crops than they would receive through the mandi system, on average about 2.5% higher (about US$6 per ton). The total benefit to farmers includes lower prices for inputs and other goods, higher yields, and a sense of empowerment. The e-Choupal system has had a measurable impact on what farmers chose to do: in areas covered by e-Choupals, the percentage of farmers planting soy has increased dramatically, from 50 to 90% in some regions, while the volume of soy marketed through mandis has dropped as much as half. At the same time, ITC benefits from net procurement costs that are about 2.5% lower (it saves the commission fee and part of the transport costs it would otherwise pay to traders who serve as its buying agents at the mandi) and it has more direct control over the quality of what it buys. The system also provides direct access to the farmer and to information about conditions on the ground, improving planning and building relationships that increase its security of supply. The company reports that it recovers its equipment costs from an e-Choupal in the first year of operation and that the venture as a whole is profitable.

In mid-2003, e-Choupal services reached more than 1 million farmers in nearly 11,000 villages, and the system is expanding rapidly. ITC gains additional benefits from using this network as a distribution channel for its products (and those of its partners) and a source of innovation for new products. For example, farmers can buy seeds, fertilizer, and some consumer goods at the ITC processing center, when they bring in their grain. Sanchalaks often aggregate village demand for some products and place a single order, lowering ITC’s logistic costs. The system is also a channel for soil testing services and for educational efforts to help farmers improve crop quality. ITC is also exploring partnering with banks to offer farmers access to credit, insurance, and other services that are not currently offered or are prohibitively expensive. Moreover, farmers are beginning to suggest—and in some cases, demand—that ITC supply new products or services or expand into additional crops, such as onions and potatoes. Thus farmers are becoming a source of product innovation for ITC.

Development Benefit
The e-Choupal system gives farmers more control over their choices, a higher profit margin on their crops, and access to information that improves their productivity. By providing a more transparent process and empowering local people as key nodes in the system, ITC increases trust and fairness. The increased efficiencies and potential for improving crop quality contribute to making Indian agriculture more competitive. Despite difficulties from undependable phone and electric power infrastructure that sometimes limit hours of use, the system also links farmers and their families to the world. Some sanchalaks track futures prices on the Chicago Board of Trade as well as local mandi prices, and village children have used the computers for schoolwork, games, and to obtain and print out their academic test results. The result is a significant step toward rural development.

Key Lessons
The e-Choupal model demonstrates that a large corporation can play a major role in recognizing markets and increasing the efficiency of an agricultural system, while doing so in ways that benefit farmers and rural communities as well as shareholders. The case also shows the key role of information technology—in this case provided and maintained by a corporation, but used by local farmers—in helping bring about transparency, increased access to information, and rural transformation. Critical factors in the apparent success of the venture are ITC’s extensive knowledge of agriculture, the effort ITC has made to retain many aspects of the existing production system, including maintenance of local partners, the company’s commitment to transparency, and the respect and fairness with which both farmers and local partners are treated.






Contributed by Kuttayan Annamalai and Sachin Rao, Michigan Business School and University of North Carolina Kenan-Flager Business School. Reprinted with permission from Digital Dividend.

To read another Global Envision article about technology in India, see Simputer: Computers for the Poor or an Idealistic Dream?