Rural stint at Varanasi: A Reality Check

12 people, 3 agendas and one place. At the start of our Rural Module, the whole thought itself sounded impossible. We were a bunch of ignorant students who though Rural India was just about poor people in mud huts with land and no resources. Then we had the very enlightening rural theory sessions where we unlearnt most of our beliefs and learnt the truth. We learnt that though part of the rural India is about mud huts and poverty, but its also about people like this guy we met in our stint who had 2 tractors, 12 bighas of land, a DVD player, LG color TV, 4 two wheelers a sprawling bungalow. Another point to note was that such an individual wasn’t a rare exception as we might imagine.

Now let me take u through some parts of our journey and the nuggets of truth that hit us like bolts of lightening from time to time.

Our group of 12 completely different people went to Varanasi for our internship. Three of us out of that had been given the task of studying MARUTI OMNI as our brand. Imagine our state when we realize that the car itself is not known by its brand name but as MARUTI VAN. This was only one of the first surprises out of many more that came our way in the 8 days that we spent there.

Our modus operandi was to first understand the system of sales there through meetings with the dealers and then chart out a route to cover the given areas. The first interesting detail we learnt was that the sales of cars in villages actually had a unique pattern. Most of the sales happen around festivals like NAVRATRI and DHANTERAS and so do the related promotional activities

Another very interesting learning was that people don’t like taking loans. They like to pay in hard cash for most of the things, even for big things like a car. Their ideology is that” WE take pride in buying everything on cash and not on Karja". But slowly and steadily they are also getting educated about safe loans and EMI’s.

One of the most interesting nugget that we learnt was that if one sees the geographical map of Varanasi, it shows that the city is divided in two half’s by the Ganges. We noticed the crops cultivated on the upper side of the Ganges were wheat, rice, sugarcane. And the other side of the river there was wheat, maize, flowers (Marigold) and tomatoes.

After probing further we came to know that it’s because of the land and the magic of river Ganges. The farmers on upper side of the Ganges have to wait a little more for the harvest and can’t harvest more than 2-3 cultivations at one time, whereas the farmers staying on other side of the Ganges could have 3-4 cultivations and could harvest earlier.

Another bolt of lightening was that don’t always depend on logic because logically anybody conclude that that the farmers who can have 3-4 harvests will be earning more money. But it’s not true as we learnt from the dealers that sales of a high involvement product like cars were more in the areas above the Ganges.

We probed further as this failure of our brilliant logical minds wasn’t that easily acceptable to us (pun intended) and we learnt that though their harvest is only twice but due to the scale of farming as well as the price fluctuations in the available neighboring markets for rice, they were earning more money.

This piece of information was really very important for all of us when we had to devise our strategy. And so my key learning’s from this stint is that we can sit in AC offices and make strategies but it’s the ground reality that has to be considered. A scrutiny at the grass root level has to be done. Then and then only you will be sure that it would work out.

And to emphasize this point of our ignorance about the true picture of Rural India and extent of opportunity available there, I would like to leave u with a fact that “there are 6, 34,000 villages in India.”

Sandesh