Socio-technological entrepreneurship seems to be the flavour of the season--and it's a nutritious diet for the progress of our economy! Fortunately, Indian companies seem to be doing it well. Here is yet another company that has proved its worth and been recognised by NASSCOM for its work on rural business centres. From the responses of Sriram Raghavan, president, Comat Technologies, it is evident that innovation is extremely important to be able to serve the needs of rural India in a sustainable manner.

How important is innovation in a tech firm like yours, and how do you keep up the vibes of innovation in your organisation?

To appropriately serve the information needs of rural citizens in India, we have always had to think of new ways of framing opportunities, and re-configure existing technologies. Delivering citizen-centric services in rural areas in a sustainable manner demands the use of simple yet robust technology, a crucial understanding of the rural environment, and building tailor-made solutions. Thinking out-of-the-box has always helped us in identifying new possibilities, improving the performance of existing services, and in delivering them through the right platform. To think innovatively, employees are encouraged to interact with rural customers, and refine ideas to successfully fulfill their needs, and scale and make profits.

You've won the recognition for a market-facing innovation. How important do you think this is, in comparison to the other two broad types, viz, process and input innovations?

All innovations have the support of a process that streamlines and strengthens the final product. Though we broadly classified our innovation as market-facing, there is also innovation in processes and inputs that makes the final product work. For example, since services are delivered in various remote locations, we have effectively used technology to centrally track cash movement, performance and employee attendance.

Can you please tell us more about your rural business centres, and elaborate a bit on the innovation that won you this award?

The rural business centre (RBC) is an ICT-enabled customer interface channel, supporting a wide menu of citizen-centric services delivery. We currently own and operate over 1000 RBCs in Karnataka and Haryana, and will soon expand to other states as well. Rural life in India is seriously hampered by its isolation and lack of infrastructure. In dealing with governments, rural citizens do not know their rights, and therefore pay bribes for essential government services, and have limited or no choice in the case of financial and educational services. Existing kiosk models that are tackling this issue find it difficult to recover costs of fixed assets, and fail to achieve economies of scale.

Comat has found three innovations to solve these fundamental problems:

• Use technology to simplify complicated tasks: Modelled after the best practices of user-friendly design in companies like Apple, we have created a much simpler interface for the RBC operators. This allows them to sell even complicated financial products, and deliver a remarkably diverse set of government services.
• Identify corporate partners who will use the RBC to deliver services through the centre, using their own personnel. For example, a fertiliser company that will both market state-of-the-art fertilisers, and offer advisory services to farmers. Traditional kiosk models attempt to deliver these services without the requisite human capital.
• Identify high-revenue activities/uses of the computer platform during off-hours. This follows the recognition that the technology itself is the largest cost of the RBC, one that must be optimally used. We currently deliver cheque truncation services for US banks during off hours, under our Rural BPO (business process outsourcing) venture.