Rural Development Through Sustainable Business Practices: Juxtaposition of Private and Public Initiatives

Abstract

‘India lives in villages’ is the philosophy of the Father of India—Mahatma Gandhi. Self-Sustaining villages are the key to the development of any nation. With this end in view, an attempt has been made to highlight such business practices that would contribute the effort of rural development. The present write up is the study of two initiatives designed and implemented in the domain of Private and Public Sectors. The first one relates to the initiative of the creation of an electronic platform, which assists farmers in marketing their produce, besides getting needed information on cropping pattern, weather, prices, availability of seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, modern methods of farming, et cetera. Started in a small measure could now impact the lives of the farmers in around 40,000 villages of ten Indian States with the coverage of four million farmers. This emerged as the best Business Model, thus attracting the attention and acclaim of even international bodies, such as Stockholm and UNIDO. The Second case study pertains to the initiative of the Government of India in developing and making it live an electronic Nation-Wide Agricultural Market [e-NAM]. Compared to the experiment of ITC, this is the one having nationwide application and thus ambitious to cover the entire country. These two case studies have the potential to have the necessary demonstration effect and can be replicated by all the developing economies.