Rural Dealership and Service Providers' Network

Association of Rural Dealers and Service Providers -
Reflections and Experiences of the First Six Months

As I get involved in the field of social enterprise, some stray thoughts cross my mind. These are thoughts of self-doubts and concerns both unfounded and real, coupled with practical day to day problems that we are facing in operations. I ask myself, is it natural for someone at the steering role to have doubts and anxieties about self and others, while he is grappling with more relevant issues of management like operational plan, opportunities and challenges, funding for the start-up phase, profitability, break-even point, scale of operations, existing and potential corporate partners, problems of staffing, resource constraints, audit, legal compliances and so on and so forth.

Sometimes, one has to learn to deal with the tension of playing a 50 over cricket match if not 20-20 game or a formula 1 car racing, while trying to incubate a social enterprise. Yes, I am not exaggerating, as on one moment you thing you are on track and the next moment you have to deal with a bad news or a setback. But I guess that is the rule of the game in a new business operations. These anxieties and worries will stay till such time we have fully laid down efficient systems and more trusted people handling responsibilities of the operations. I often tell myself, there is no going back or using the popular Hindi saying "jab okhli mein sar rakh diya to musli se kya darna" that in English would mean - when one has placed his head in the mortar then what is the point in fearing the pestle. Surprisingly, I find myself filled with new energy and courage that help me overcome any self-doubt and get me going for many days all together. I have learnt through my long career in development sector that hard work has no substitute.

Yet there is another category of issues, that causes deepest of anxieties for us in the Reach Support team. These are mostly related to our mandatory dealings with regulatory authorities and their way of functioning. I often think why should these questions and concerns, arise at the first place. After all we have been working for the development of our society and the country. When we look at these concerns closely, they point at the deep rot of our social and political systems and their functioning. In this domain, our professional, logical and ethical approaches all fall flat. yet, we are from the beginning, with the help of our Chartered Accountants, are investing in professional systems. In the the current financial year, being also the first year of operations, our transaction is likely to touch 
` 10 m level including the rural dealership project with Tata Tea, if we are able to meet our slightly ambitious projections. This entails having a system fully geared to meet all the compliance requirements including payments of all taxes on time.

I am sometimes taken in by own abilities to do really hard back-breaking work and in going through spells of hardships. Be it times when one has to work late in the night to finish a presentation, a proposal or a report; or travelling in harsh conditions, sometimes, using public transport, or spending the night in a room full of mosquitoes with frequent load shedding, in the hot summer. But then I think, how people who are at the centre of our organisation’s vision, live their everyday lives even without basic amenities. I think of the pain a mother or a father undergoes in not being able to fulfil a very mundane demand of school stationery or a simple ride to the city, for want of money. Compare their situation with us and the privileges that we have learnt to take for granted.

Certain practical problems and questions therein are far too complex to finding an easy or quick solution, specially for us inexperienced in trade. Even with a firm resolve, one finds himself on sticky wicket when faced with the so called teething trouble of a new organisation, These relate to staffing issues of getting good talented people interested to join you and retaining them. Recruiting the first few staff of the organisation, gets really tricky as people despite accepting the appointment may drops out apparently for silly reasons despite the best that is offered to them.

 One also has to always be ready to be available on phone to solve the problems of the giys in the field. Some of them sometimes come to you for small things like should one send a scan copy of the PAN card or a photo copy by post or courier, which though irritating actually don't take much effort or time to solve. On other occasions they come up with some serious problems like fight with the some urban distributor/ agent over territory, or improper packing or low quality of the economic brand (that too of a pioneering company!), reporting problems with online banking, or someone wanting to drop out or wanting areas to be reallocated and scores of other problems, that Reach Services alone cannot solve. Communication with the corporate partner on solving some of the ground level issues, is sometime slow and frustrating as is the lack of responsiveness of the corporate system.

 Issue of finding an angel investor like in micro-credit often comes to my mind. Starting off an enterprise from the scratch is not easy, unless there is some genuine funding towards he promotional expenses. Even if you are working on a business model from the day one, you have to plan for a gestation period. So the directors end up being the underwriters using hard earned funds of their own, spouse, close relatives and friends.

Coming to realise as days go by, start-up fund or seed money for a social venture is really critical if you want to work on a certain scale. Again at the end of the day, a revenue model on trading and providing services depend on scale or volume. Hence there is no scope of working small here as one will not be able to survive in the trade. We are approaching many agencies, government and private for some start-up support, without success. I had an opportunity to visit some social enterprises in Taiwan few years back. There I noticed that many social enterprises are blooming because of a very supportive government policy in place. Apparently, government does not normally give grants there but there is a climate that encourages social investments by private parties, and even accessing seed capital and soft loans is easy. Looking at the overall scenario here, one feels a bit frustrated.

 There is so much of shallowness and lies that shroud our public discourse. Our governments pretends that it has problem solving capabilities that was never there. Year after year respective governments at the centre and states managed to fool people by way of offering magic bullet solutions packed in so called flagship schemes. Going into the specifics of the schemes and presenting their critique is not my intent here. It should suffice saying that unless one has a big patron or one is willing to invest speed money, getting support from the government is not possible for any new organisation.  While I hear of some non government funding agencies’ interest in social enterprise, it is not easy to get their support as our work looks very basic and no glamorous at its face. Our efforts to get support from one such agency is still continuing.

There are many systemic problems in our country that have grown in complexities over years.  Few states manifests them more than others and we are by choice in some of such states. There are problems with our politics and democracy, with our own people. It is but natural then that we have to equip ourselves to deal with the problems associated with incubating a new organisation and a new initiative even though it means a lot of energy and efforts, we have no choice.

We are struggling to find efficient ways in dealing with the regulatory authorities who are not trained to discern the difference of objectives of a social enterprise and a purely corporate enterprise. That should in fact not make any great difference, provided the system deals with each case legally but sensibly, meaning not finding loopholes for not doing something desirable or rejecting an application. Multiplicity of regulatory authority and ambiguity of legal provisions and laws cause a major problem.

The dealings for a new corporate entity could be about registration under certain acts or provisions both central government and state specific, be it companies act, change of purpose of business, TIN, permission to carry trade from municipal authorities and even if you have a trade licence its purview may restrict you to only and only certain activities. So if you want to expand the purview by adding certain new activities you have to apply for a fresh trade licence, as apparently the existing one can not be amended. But then you can not apply for a fresh licence also from the same address. Similarly, for TIN you have to produce the copy of the house tax bill of premise where you are operating from. Agreement will not suffice. If the house owner does not cooperate then your application gets rejected despite your genuine claim.

And mind you, most of these processes are online. So what happens? You get offers from firms who specialise in providing consultancy services to solve these problems. You have started off your operations, there are already many people dependent on you for their livelihoods, so you buy these services or chose to give it a try once more, on your own. After all your intent is 100 per cent genuine. So, same set, same scene, you go for a retake, another month passes by and you are back at square one. Exactly where we are today, so what next? Why don’t we pay for the consultancy and get things sorted out then? Silly we! Going by the norm of the day, we should just get things done, after all this will not mean we are not bribing someone! Well the list of dilemma gets longer then. But what gets us gong is our strong urge to try the social entrepreneurship route to create self-employment opportunity for a large number of people including myself.

We are creating a network of educated unemployed, rural youth, as dealers and service providers. Through them we plan to introduce various goods and services as per rural demand and in the process as we say we create a win win situation for all concerned. Quality at minimum possible cost is what the people gets sitting at their home, the youth get self-employed and opportunity to excel in their own businesses, corporate are able to expand their market share, banks and financial institutions are able to reach the unreached and we fulfil our mission of linking the poor, disabled, women and youth linked to emerging opportunities for economic and social development.

At the end of the day, we are satisfied as we are seeing result of the hard work that we as a team, has put forth in the last six months, is showing remarkable result already. We are also fortunate to have a market leader company, supporting the start-up cost even though indirectly, by paying stipend to the rural dealers and picking up some of their costs at least for the first couple of years. There are issues related to slow progress. There are issues of laziness of some of our rural dealers, quality of product, or urban dealers impinging into rural markets, issues of cost differences even if it is marginal between our rural dealers' and urban distributors of the products of the same company. Some of these get solved immediately, some linger on despite our best efforts to find immediate solutions, some due to fault at our end and some due to the fault of our partner and some with no fault of ours. But we are also learning to do business, learning to say no and take some real hard decisions.

More than two decades of working in the voluntary sector work in India has a lot of influence in the way I think today. I have got used to a certain way of looking at things, going deeper and questioning endlessly, trusting, caring and taking responsibilities. Working in Indian grant making organisations, was very exciting, with scarce resources always challenging us to think beyond the obvious, ask right questions and reach the unreached. Many times we failed in even garnering the minimum resources but at least we went to common people, talked to them and tried to understand what might possibly work if genuinely tried. In many cases, we saw people doing it with or without our resources or grants. Thanks to such learning, one makes efforts to understand by talking and listening to people, and asking questions to explore solutions from a new perspective.

The voluntary sector experience of going deep and probing beyond the obvious, is very useful in my new work. However, the disadvantage of having worked in the social sector if one may say so, is that we tend to listen more to what our heart says than letting our mind rule. In business, even if it is a social enterprise, I am learning fast, how to take orders from the mind without suppressing the heart’s appeal. While interviewing people for recruitment, we came across very genuine and capable people but as they failed to meet a single criteria that they don't own a bike, we could not take them. From my experience of the development sector, I can say one would have been more open in accepting people with certain disadvantages. There is though no clear line of demarcation between the two sectors, as I recall many times, one has taken hard decisions like withdrawing a grant or asking someone to leave, even in my previous organisations. But here the norm is to take decisions based on profit considerations. We as a social enterprise will try to balance profit, people and planet factors not exactly in the same order but we can not forget that our operations is not grants based. Only as we earn profit, we can do justice to our social objective. In that sense, earning profit is just a means, and that knowledge from the beginning will inform our value system, work ethics and standards.

Looking back, to also address my own anxieties, I find my whole experience in the voluntary sector, helped me to work with common people, specially the poor and the marginalised. I learnt in some measures how to communicate, specially with those who do not have a voice or a say in things around them, even about their own lives and their bodies. Look at a woman from the poorest strata of the society. She works the hardest in her family both in the rile of a provider and a care giver. Yet she does not have a say in sending children to school, in joining an SHG, in enrolling herself for a vocational training, joining an evening literacy programme or things as fundamental as when to marry, how many children she will bear. This knowledge is the capital, on the strength of which we have jumped into the deep water of businesses.

In the long run I believe, working with the corporate stream, is going to be very useful. I think we are fortunate that we are learning to deal with corporate agencies in business term, which is different from their CSR dealings. Latter I feel is laced with hypocratic icing. Whereas the business cares about profitability, so there is a recognition of truth, as in what works and what does not. There is deep recognition, in certain quarters of the corporate sector, including our present partner that there is no short cut to success. I can therefore feel very satisfied by my decision to start wortking in  a new mode. This is like my second innings and I want to not just bat and bowl well but field well too, as I have a match to win.
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