Ashutosh challenged me about Essmart’s concept as a technology distributor. Although he agreed that rural distribution is a huge problem (he knows so, through his experience with BP and through operating Villgro Stores), perhaps it is the technologies themselves that require more careful consideration. Ashutosh said that quite often, the design of what Essmart calls “essential technologies” is second-rate. Designers have begun to put affordability at the forefront, and they trade off with quality. Designers should be putting functionality first and then figure out how to make the technology less expensive. Or, they should focus more on financing schemes for technology that actually works.

We both agreed that marketing is a huge issue. No one wants to be told, “You’re poor, so you get this technology that is made specifically for people like you and is different from what rich people are using.” We at Essmart understand this completely. We don’t want to sell frills, but we do want to project our products as those that make happy and prosperous rural households.

• Distribute high-quality products, even if they are more expensive.
• Distribute products with warrantees and facilitate the exchange/refund process.
• Offer insurance and service on all products.

I’m not sure if this is economical, but it’s something we need to do. We’re considering a few models to do it (an educational/training nonprofit arm?), but we still need to sit down and figure out all of the economics and financials. I’ve realized that I’m not as pro at Excel as I thought I was. There is much to learn, and hopefully next semester’s Sloan classes will help.

Here we go again! Surveys with shop owners.

Dharmasthala is known for its temple. People often do pilgrimages here.

Tobacco-free chewing stuffs. Made from areca nuts (I think). The other chewing stuffs have tobacco. Thus, the packages are marked with scorpions.

This elephant was making its way to the temple, too.

SELCO Energy Center inside of a shipping container. Entrepreneurs rent out solar lanterns and charge Rs 5/- for charging mobile phones. There’s also a clean drinking water fountain.

Solar lantern charging station.

Mobile phone charging station.

Sam demonstrates how free fresh drinking water makes you happy.

Even though I was barely in Ujire, my time there became routinized. We left the SELCO Lab around 5:30 pm. I took a bath. Then I met Sam and sometimes others for dinner at Sapna Hotel. This veg restaurant was evidently the best place in town. And in a 14,000 person town, well, that is kind of sad. Thus, there was a reason why I decided to come to Bangalore two days early.

This article about PlayPumps talks more about when technologies go wrong. Do not let this happen to you.

As you can see, I’m a bit behind on blog posts. More are coming soon. But some exciting updates: With the hard work of four Master’s students from Pollachi, we rolled out about 130 surveys of rural retail shop owners. Then we began our inventory experiment in two shops. Five of the d.light S10 solar lanterns, which are priced at about $11, sold out. We’re now trying to figure out the best way to replenish stock and pay appropriate incentives.

Our first meeting with the students

After the introduction, the students split up in four different directions to begin surveying. The goal was to complete 15 for the day. I joined Eknath, who Prashanth said was the most eager to survey from the beginning. We traveled by what is becoming one of my favorite forms of transportation: motorbike. There’s nothing like whizzing past farmland on the back of a motorbike.

The first store we stopped by was a huge supermarket. Eknath, who is getting his Master’s in Social Work and has a lot of survey experience, was pretty professional in getting this information. The first survey went well, and the shop owner was interested in Essmart’s products (more on that soon). We surveyed on, skipping lunch to make sure we finished 15. With each shop, I stepped further back. It was faster for Eknath to handle the surveying alone, since he wouldn’t feel compelled to translate everything for me. I observed the interactions and gauged shop owners’ interest from afar, answering Eknath’s questions as they came up. I also took a lot of pictures.

Mid-afternoon, Eknath stopped for tea at his aunt’s place. It was a modest house, and his cute little cousins were also there. Eknath began calling me his sister – his akka. Note: This was not the first time that an Indian guy had begun calling me his sister. Prashanth said they did this to make them feel more comfortable. In his words, they wanted me to know that they were not hitting on me. Fair enough. I just hope that having new brothers does not come with obligations to another family.

The first round of survey results were interesting. We found that Tamil Nadu is a great market for solar – especially solar lanterns and solar inverters. Finding this out made me think, Wow, this can actually work. And, wow, we need to incorporate quickly. We finished about 60 surveys, thanks to Prashanth’s big thinking and incentives scheme.

After debriefing with the students, Prashanth and I got the technologies out of his car. We took stock. The inventory: Five each of d.light S250s, S10s, and S1s, Five Envirofit G-3330 cooking stoves, one Envirofit LED lantern, one BOPEEI solar panel/mobile charger/lantern, and one Tata Swach. Not a lot, but at least it was something. Were we really going to begin selling these things? We would figure it out later.

Prashanth did the driving, and I did my best to look for signs. I also managed the music, playing songs off my iPod, which was running low on batteries. We stopped in Salem for lunch. Prashanth had done some type of schooling out there, and he spent some time driving his big Jeep through small streets to look for this one particular restaurant. Prashanth hadn’t been back to Salem in years, and he said that the streets looked kind of the same yet kind of different. The restaurant was never found, so we went to this very nice hotel for lunch and chowed down on butter chicken and sweet lime soda.

We got our 200 surveys printed at a shop in Salem, too. Lesson learned: if you want to do printing, go to a large shop. The tiny ones over charge. The shop we went to was pretty good, except they printed our color pictures on A3 paper and cut them in half. The person who did the cutting was quite inefficient. I guess I’d be okay with that if the quality were up to par, but it wasn’t. After printing, we stopped by a stationery store to buy a stapler, sheet protectors, and pens. Prashanth requested his favorite cheap pen: the FineGrip Cello. Note taken.

Essmart’s beautiful surveys

Prashanth said that Tamil Nadu’s roads are relatively nice compared to the rest of the country. I was still freaked out by parts of the drive, though, especially when it got dark. There was a lot of construction, and sometimes the wide roads turned into two-way roads. When we wanted to pass a slow bus or truck, we’d pass on the right … and be driving into another cars’ headlights for a brief moment of time. Prashanth is a great driver, though, and we made it to Pollachi safely.

I will say that the drive was also quite gorgeous. Tamil Nadu is luscious. There is green everywhere. Here’s a picture of the road at dusk. It was pink and dusty.

• From Envirofit: 1) Tamil Nadu is a terrible market for cooking stoves because the previous two governments have promised LPG and other freebies. I felt my previously low confidence in cooking stoves sink progressively lower. 2) However, Tamil Nadu is a great market for solar. This was proven true through our Pollachi experiment. 3) For suppliers, if their own proprietary distribution channel to retailers fails to work, they can always go with business to business sales. 4) Traditional suppliers sell mature products, not concept products like cookstoves. 5) Financing retailers does make sense, but we need to get banks and MFIs onboard with us. Not too many finance shop owners yet.
• From Cogknit: 1) Contrary to popular belief, rural users don’t mind paying for new products as long as their perception of quality is high. 2) There might be potential for using cable operators as sellers.
• From Micrograam: 1) Microfinance institutions charge really high interest rates on loans (but Micrograam tries cutting these rates down). 2) To do microsavings, as we had explored with someone from Harvard, we would need bank backing to be legal. Some rural banks have individuals in the village who open bank accounts an deposit money. This could be another sales agent.
• From Koshy’s (not a meeting with Koshy’s, but a meeting at Koshy’s): 1) People oftentimes need pushing to get things done. 2) An organization of any repute requires a team, not just a leader.

Harish is all about holistic solutions that are affordable and income-increasing. He wants to keep money within the community, not suck it out by selling consumer products to the poor. He wants to make producers or employees, not just consumers. For SELCO, financing has been the key to making social entrepreneurship work. The company’s ability to facilitate rural bank loans for end users to purchase solar home lighting systems was a breakthrough.

Interestingly, Harish’s speech stood in contrast to Narayana Murthy’s on Day 1. Murthy was about scale; Harish was about “going deep,” or expanding scope in one geographical area. SELCO operates in Karnataka and does not seem to want to expand beyond the state. However, Harish wants to encourage other entrepreneurs to replicate SELCO’sprocess. Thus, he wants SELCO to be scalable as an organizational model, but not as an organization. And I think that makes a lot of sense.

After his talk, I found Harish and talked with him about Essmart. He said that our philosophies are different; he sells a service, and we sell products. I think that Essmart really needs to cling tightly to its goal of making essential technologies available to rural households. We need to understand the needs at a deeper level so that we properly address them through the right collection of technologies. We are not just a distributor. There are indeed real differences there.

Later, after lunch, I tried my hand at networking again. A new friend introduced me to the founders of BOPEEI(Bottom of Pyramid Energy and Environmental Innovations). BOPEEI is an India-based company that engineers, well, solar lanterns. I ended up with a free solar panel, light, and mobile phone charger to show off in Pollachi. I also met the Program Director for the Sri Siddhantha Foundation. Someone in that organization is really interested in technologies for rural areas, and the organization has reach all over the country. It might be interesting to pair with them as well.

I spent some time on the phone with a person handling d.light finances from Delhi. I had some trouble sending money over, but fortunately (very, very fortunately), it all worked out. The lights were shipped to Prashanth’s place in Chennai and were brought along to Pollachi.