Rural India: Bharat’s Growth Pillar

Unfortunately, we are going to cross a million COVID-19 positive cases by the end of this week, while Top 10 states are contributing above 84% of the cases as per latest India Situation Report by WHO.

Amidst this, now everyone has not only started talking, but focusing on…hey…what is there in rural?

Well, my view is that just measuring ‘Substitution Effect’ to get more enquiries (read demand in general) in rural is not going to help, rather we’ll have to take a micro-look on ‘Income Effect’ in order to give a sharp impetus to what economists call as drawing the ‘Compensated Demand Curve’.

I love digging deeply to countryside and here are some points in support of what I mentioned above:

1. Define the rural: If we go by the way RBI uses a threshold of 10,000 inhabitants to define rural, we’ll probably not be in a position to define it for our product/service. It needs to be categorized further, wherein certain other criteria related to income pattern, consumption schema, and most importantly, socio-economic pattern might be required to get added. The new SEC System as developed by MRSI and MRUC might be of some help here, but will again have…