A Very Good News For all of us
The Success of ruralhaat Highlighted
The Hapus Mangoes is speciality of Kokan region & is well known as king of
fruits.
The cachy advertise on our portal "Mangoes from tree to home" caught the
attention of buyers & cultivator Pramod from remote village Matond in Kokan who
has posted this ad got the order from Dubai.Hearty congrats pramod from
ruralhaat pariwar ruralhaat pariwar
Rural products of India are unique, innovative and have good utility and values.
Large number of these rural products (like handicraft items, food products,
embroidery, clothes & other products) sustains a significant segment of the
population in the rural areas. Several attributes of rural products can be
identified, for which, it has a demand in the market. Out of the lots, ‘ethnic
origin’ and ‘indigenous design & appearance’ are two traits of rural products,
attracting a premium in the market.
Products in local use are also not marketed horizontally; they often first
travel down to market through a long chain of intermediaries and then up to more
difficult locations in the rural areas. In the process, the people in rural
areas suffer from both low prices as producers and high prices as consumers. In
this conflict, rural products loss its equilibrium and the supply side becomes
exponentially high. Because of this hazard, rural entrepreneurs face acute
economic loss and rural markets become stagnantnant
Market linkages for rural products
There are, broadly speaking, three ways in which they can be connected to the
markets. They can do it on their own — through cooperatives. Or, the state can
do it for them — through its procurement engines. Stages one and two, in a
manner of speaking. Today, developmental thinking on market linkages has reached
stage three — linkages through companies or industries. Rural markets are
regarded as organizations for marketing non-farm products in a traditional
setting. Developing rural markets is one of the major concerns of government
and Non-governmental organization in India.
Across India, previous attempts to create such linkages have floundered. Take
Assam and other eastern states itself. Around the Eighties, the state government
here decided that cooperatives were a great way to consolidate its political
base. Loans went to the undeserving. Debts were written off. The institutions
slowly got corrupted. As for the linkages provided by the state, these offer
uncertain sustainability. Given this context, one can conclude that
profit-oriented industry linkages are a more sustainable, more scalable
alternative. In this scenario, companies can use the social infrastructure (the
self help group et al) as an alternative procurement and distribution chain and
vise versa.
Industry’s role in building market
linkages:
To make an effective market linkage, industries have to play as an engine of
market, which can generate a brand image of the rural products. This initiative
of industries will also strengthen the backward and forward linkages of the
rural market, besides, accelerating the innovations of the rural products.
Definitely, this strategy will also give a remarkable dividend to the industries
& profit making companies. In micro level, it is observed that to create a
sustainable market linkage for rural products, industries can develop an
ecosystem of Self Help Groups (SHGs) by involving the local communities through
village level empowerment. It is nothing less than the next phase in the
democratization of commerce. Under this paradigm, industries can create a
network with viable marketing channels covering all the linkages from villages
to the global level. This architecture provides the right value of procurement
through the village procurement centres and rural entrepreneurs can sell their
products faster with better price realization. This model is also capable of
generating a consumer business and an output business in a win-win scenario,
where rural producers can get a wide marketing horizon and the industries shall
get a new, lower cost ‘salesforce’.
Scope & opportunities:
The basic scope of this novel initiative will be the mutual benefits of the
rural entrepreneurs and industries. The entrepreneurs – primary beneficiaries,
SHGs – bridge with the community, participating companies/industries and rural
consumers have befitted through a robust commercial relationship. These models
of marketing linkages demonstrate a large corporation which can play a major
role in reorganizing markets and increasing the efficiency of a rural product
generation system.
Because of this sustainable market linkages, rural producers can participate in
the benefits of globalization and will also develop their capacity to maintain
global quality standard. Nonetheless, it creates new stakeholders for the
industry sector. And subsequently, they become part of the firms’ core
businesses. The involvement of the private /industry sector at the rural product
and market development can also provide opportunities for the development of new
services and values to the customers, which will find application in the
developed markets. It will be worth mentioning that building a sustainable
market linkage through industry’s intervention will also empower the rural mass
(producers, farmers & entrepreneurs) to cope with socio-economic problems in the
rural society and will ensure economic self –reliance.
Challenges:
Only consistent performance can convince the skeptics. Therefore, the
industries must play a catalytic role to cope with this challenge and should
also train the entrepreneurs to develop their managerial and IT skills. On the
other hand, the products of the existing and popular brand also stand as threat
to the rural products. These global giants (brand) may try to suppress the rural
products in the markets with its communication hype. Therefore, developing
alternative and additional market linkages for these products is an absolute
necessity. Moreover, the low volumes of rural products, high operating cots,
high attrition, and absence of local know how and relationships may also create
problem in the process. Henceforth, it is essential to make a way out to cope
with these odds.
Conclusion:
The core of a scientific approach is to understand the market opportunities for
rural products along with the country's development priorities and to chalk out
a strategy where rural industries have an important role to play. While rural
products are forced to increasingly become part of global supply chains, these
products need to adapt themselves, not only according to the changing tastes of
the national market, but also according to changes in tastes in the
international market. Therefore, a process is essential to explore the market
linkages and capacity building for SHGs through a bottom up approach and
continuous dialogue with stakeholders of rural enterprise. This process should
ensure the participation of rural people as consumers and producers in the
globalization mechanism, with better livelihoods and global access to markets.
The real challenge of building a sustainable market linkage starts here.