FarmAid

Rural Innovations Company is taking the first steps in setting up its FarmAid store in rural India. The FarmAid store is something like the Home Depot in the US, a store that is a one-stop shop for everything you need for a do-it-yourself job.
The concept behind this store is that the store will give the people in the villages easy access to goods that they have to travel 40 kilometers to buy. The goods in this store will be relevant to their daily lives and will also serve as a seasonal seeds outlet.
This store brings will be innovative in a few ways. It will have in-store experts to work with the villagers on water harvesting, use of fertilizers and pesticides and also guide them through the various seed options they have for each season. The store will also explore the option of offering personal lines of credit based on their ability to make monthly payments.
At the end of the day, the success of a business enterprise depends solely on the long term sustainability of the venture and that is the primary goal of this FarmAid store; to make a decent profit while providing quality service to the village.

Inefficiencies of the Indian Bureaucracy

The single biggest reason for the failure of the bureaucratic system in India is the lack of accountability. There are lots of other minor reasons as well, ones ranging from simply laziness to lack of motivation. It is this 800 pound gorilla in the room that India acknowledges but shrugs off as impossible to tackle and therefore pretends to ignore, that is crushing the spirit of the Indian Entrepreneur.

When I went to the State Bank of India, a nationalized bank in India, a few months ago to discuss my business venture and the prospects of a loan, I raised quite a few eyebrows. The manager was extremely eager to talk to me and I was there for a while. When I was leaving, he pulled me aside and explained the reason for his enthusiasm; I was the first entrepreneur who was starting a business in this town in 50 years.

I was amazed back then, now I am not. Five and a half months have gone by since that conversation. Today I think I am crazy to have started a business here. This is why:

Broadband internet service: 5 months since my initial application and still waiting. The excuses in the past two weeks have been that first the technician’s wife was unwell, then the technician was unwell and this morning, the technician’s boss was unwell.

Opening a business account: 2 weeks (It took me one week just to get the application form because the guy who knows where the form is stored in the bank was not available)

Registering the business: 2 months (I was told that it would have happened much faster if I have bribed the official)

Guess how long all this would have taken in the US: less than four hours!

The inefficiencies of the bureaucracy are the result of an inherently flawed system but through my dealings with these officials I have realized one other fact; that an inefficient system slowly starts to create inefficient and dishonest people almost in a Darwinian evolution sort of way whereby in the end it is not just the system that is corrupt, but the very souls of the individuals who work in the system are irreversibly corrupted as well.