Vodafone Plc, one of the largest mobile phone network operators in the world, acquired Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa’s majority stake in a leading Indian mobile operator, Hutch, in May this year. Vodafone, which operates through a joint venture with the Essar Group in India, began a massive re-branding exercise throughout India last week, with ads featuring Hutch’s lovable pug switching from a pink home to a red home splashed all over the media.

Vodafone, with more than 200 million subscribers worldwide, enters the exciting Indian telecom market, which is now growing at a faster pace than the Chinese market, adding more than 6 million subscribers every month. Why is this development interesting to a social entrepreneur? Well, Vodafone is among a very few corporations worldwide which have integrated business and social responsibility.

Vodafone, led by its charismatic CEO, Arun Sarin, has announced that it plans to target the vast rural market in India. Nearly 87% of India’s 1.1 billion population is still to get a mobile connection. Mobile phones have the capability to bridge the digital divide and still make for profitable businesses. Vodafone has realized that and hence, has come up with low-cost handsets through an agreement with Chinese manufacturer, ZTE Corporation. Vodafone’s affiliate company, Vodacom, runs more than 24,000 community phone shops in South Africa. Vodafone has shown a keen interest in the mobile banking initiative of WIZZIT in South Africa and Vodacom has recently tied up with WIZZIT to sell its mobile banking products. It will be interesting to see when and how will Vodafone introduce such products and services in India.

Access to mobile phones can mean a whole lot of opportunities to introduce various value-added services to rural customers in emerging economies such as India. Increased mobile phone penetration also means a lot of opportunities for local entrepreneurs since Vodafone is likely to tie-up with them to offer banking and other services to customers at the base of the economic pyramid. It will be very interesting to see what Vodafone’s strategy and growth model in India will be. Keep watching this space for updates!

Meanwhile, I am just back from a friend’s place where I watched our Indian team win the Twenty20 Cricket World Cup on television. The atmosphere on the streets of Bangalore was electric, as I waved past hundreds of fans celebrating the win.

The last time I wrote about micro-insurance in an online forum, I had profiled various micro-insurance initiatives in India. Theses initiatives can be broadly divided into two categories: community-driven co-operative models and private enterprise-driven for-profit models.

One of the finest examples of the community-driven co-operative model is the Yeshasvini scheme, which provides health insurance cover to poor farmers in the my home state of Karnataka. The scheme was initiated by an enterprising heart surgeon from Bangalore, Dr. Devi Shetty. The scheme has been actively supported by the Karnataka state Government Co-operative Department and offers quality healthcare to more than 2 million farmers, at a small annual premium.

At the other end of the spectrum are commercial insurance companies, such as the state-owned Life Insurance Corporation of India, Bajaj Allianz and Tata AIG, which are also entering the micro-insurance space. Here, a for-profit corporate model, which typically operates through designated individual insurance agents, comes into play.

My article in the online forum attracted a strong comment from the Director of Delhi-based Micro Insurance Academy, who is of the opinion that co-operative models have dual advantage: the community gets health insurance cover and the profits are distributed to stakeholders within the community. He expressed his concern about the entry of private players into the micro-insurance space.

While I agree with the Director’s opinion, I also believe in the power of private enterprise. Each model has its own pros and cons. Co-operative models typically face the problem of scalability. They require support from the Government for this, as in the Yeshasvini scheme, but this support is not always an option. Also, co-operative models find it difficult to partner with quality healthcare service providers. Private insurance companies, on the other hand, can achieve scalability more easily and they also come with tremendous contacts in the healthcare industry. But there is always the risk of private models being driven more by profits and less by the concern to provide quality healthcare to the poor.

What could be interesting is a hybrid model, wherein a private player takes care of scalability and partnerships and a co-operative society, working closely with the private player, takes care of the healthcare needs of the community. The co-operative society can also act as an insurance agent for the private enterprise. Profits can be shared between the private player and the co-operative society.

It is simply amazing how conversations with people of varied life experiences can bring a completely different perspective to one's thoughts. Last year, during one such conversation with my dad, I was going gung-ho about technology's infinite possibilities and its enormous potential. My dad, who hails from an agricultural village, listened to me patiently till the end and said "I see. But tell me one thing. How has your technology improved the lives of our farmers?” I didn't have an answer at that time, so I promised to revert with some concrete examples. And my search ended the very next day, when a friend told me about ITC's e-Choupal initiative.

ITC is one of India's largest and oldest business conglomerates, with business interests in hotels, cigarettes and tobacco, consumer goods, agricultural trading etc. ITC's International Business Division (IBD) is involved in providing a supply chain for India’s agricultural produce, through exports or otherwise. When ITC made its foray into agribusiness, it realized that there were numerous constraints, such as innumerable intermediaries, poor infrastructure, lack of modern agricultural know-how etc, which plagued Indian agriculture. As a solution to all these problems, ITC launched the e-Choupal initiative.

Choupal in Hindi means a gathering place. Taking this gathering place to the virtual world, ITC introduced the e-Choupal initiative in the year 2000. This e-revolution of rural India began with the soybean farmers of the villages in Madhya Pradesh region but has since expanded to nearly 40,000 villages across India and serves nearly 4 million farmers today.

The modus operandi of e-Choupal is simple. ITC sets up kiosks in villages, which typically have a computer with an internet connection. One of the farmers in the village is trained to use the computer. He will be responsible for helping the other farmers in using the computer. Information about advanced farming techniques, market demands, weather forecast and current market prices of agricultural produce, can be obtained by the farmers through the kiosk. Access to an e-Choupal kiosk is free of cost. This information helps the farmers grow crops which will be in demand and also which suit the weather forecast of that particular year. It also helps them get a fair price for their produce, which wouldn’t have been possible otherwise due to intermediaries.

This initiative also creates a direct supply chain to ITC, which buys the agricultural produce directly from the farmers. ITC ensures a secure supply of produce to itself through this and also lowers its procurement costs by eliminating traders and intermediaries. ITC also uses the e-Choupal as a medium to advertise its consumer products where farmers can buy ITC’s products.

The e-Choupal initiative is a fantastic example of how technology can be used to create win-win situation for both the enterprise and the market. The initiative, which has transformed ordinary farmers into savvy marketers, has been featured in a World Resources Institute’s case study and C K Prahalad’s book, Fortune at the bottom of the pyramid: Eradicating poverty through profits. The initiative aims to reach 100,000 villages and 10 million farmers in the next few years. And also allows me to stay gung-ho about technology!