L-R: Dr. Satya Dash, Mr. Pradeep Kashyap, Mr. Benjamin Mathew, Mr. Sanjay Gupta, Mr. Saroj Mohanta and Mr. Kirti Mishra

Mr. Pradeep Kashyap needs no introduction. He is considered to be the father of rural marketing in India and has been a pioneer in designing and implementing innovative business models in the social development sector, especially in the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) with several exceptional projects since the late 1980s. He combines a rich experience in the corporate world with more than two decades of experience in the social sector. One of the best known projects that established linkages between social development and rural marketing was Project Shakti*, that was designed, piloted and implemented for Hindustan Lever Limited by Mr. Kashyap and his team at MART*. Project Shakti has gained recognition as a leading example of participatory growth across the world. In mid February 2010, I had an opportunity to meet and discuss with Mr. Kashyap and MART’s partners Mr. Kirti Mishra, Mr. Saroj Mohanta, Mr. Benjamin Mathew and Mr. Sanjay Gupta about MART’s innovative projects and dynamics of changes in rural India. Here are a few excerpts from a two hour interview in which Mr. Kashyap spoke about MART and changes in rural India amongst other things.

Q. How was MART founded?

Pradeep Kashyap: I left the corporate sector after 20 years in 1987 and my idea was never to start an organisation. I didn’t start an organisation until 1995 when we named ourselves as MART. However MART as a partnership was established in 2003. Before then we had a loose kind of arrangement where everybody was working together.

My idea was to apply the knowledge I had. I recognised that the strength I had was in the marketing area and this was completely missing in the social and development sector. Nobody believed that you needed marketing in the social sector. When you are working with the NGOs who are helping villagers produce handicrafts, incense sticks or even soaps, they are competing with the corporate sector and they do need professional marketing to be able to compete with the corporate.

Q. What are MART’s focus, motivations and philosophies?

Pradeep Kashyap: Our focus is the BoP emerging markets. The philosophy we follow is social heart and business mind. There are three different kinds of organisations- NGO, corporation and the government. NGOs bring a social heart and a social mind and that is the reason why they are not good at strategies of scale up. They do great work in small geographies but their work continues to remain localised. The Corporate sector which wants to enter the BoP markets brings a business mind and unfortunately sometimes a harsh business heart. Their whole orientation is mostly being concerned about numbers and sales. The government brings a business heart and social mind which is wrong. We realised that we need a different kind of organisation which has a very strong business mind but has a lot of compassion for the poor- a social heart. Because, unless you empathise with the poor, you won’t be able to find the solutions that are best for them.

Since I came from the corporate sector and started in the working the social sector, I could see a potential for bridges and synergies between these two sectors. The critical role MART plays is to make corporate understand the community language and the community to understand the corporate participation as well as the government. We offer end to end solutions from research to strategy and capacity building in the emerging markets.

Our philosophy is also teamwork in truest sense of team work, and building a totally flexible, non-hierarchical organisation. We are not just giving lip service to this. All our projects are team based. So it’s not uncommon for a junior most person to lead a project in MART if that person has that capability which is required for that project. That gives a huge moral boost to young people. They get the opportunity to lead a project. Our logo is handshake between two people with bowed heads. We believe that you can acquire knowledge if you are humble. We are constantly building partnerships with experts.

In 1989 I was appointed as marketing advisor to the Ministry of Rural Development (MRD) Government of India. That opened my eyes to a larger vision and a macro picture of this country. I had an umbrella view. That I think was very crucial which has helped to develop this vision because one could see it from top and that also gave me excellent networks with NGOs.

Q. What other projects did you do during those early years after you left the corporate world?

Pradeep Kashyap:  With MRD I started a concept of sales exhibition called Gram Shree Melas (exhibition) where artisans could bring their products directly to these exhibitions which are held in the cities. The advantage to the rural artisans is that there were no middlemen; they get the full value for their products. They get to interact with buyers whom they would otherwise never be able to see and hence not understand their taste. We also used to conduct training programs during melas. We would bring some designers, packaging experts, research experts and marketing experts who would talk about positioning and various other things to the rural artisans. I ran this program for three years in which 70-80 such Gram Shree Melas were run. The program continued after I left and 300 of such exhibitions all across India in 75 cities from 1989 till 2000 were run by CAPART- the government’s nodal autonomous body for NGOs.

Then in 1993 I bid for and got a World Bank project called Women’s Enterprise Management Training Outreach Program (WEMTOP) for which the requirement was six people and therefore I had to set up a team. It was working with poor women who were artisans etc and teaching them business skills, how to cost their products, break even analysis. It was very innovative training. This was all done through visuals, lots of games and role plays.  After WEMTOP, we disbanded and then in 1995 we started MART. Later in 2000 we started project Shakti which was until 2005, that was the first big visibility project we did. That put us on the national and the international map.

Q. You have been mapping rural India for 2 decades. What in your opinion have been significant changes in rural India?

Pradeep Kashyap: There have been a few significant changes. The first is the microfinance (MF)  movement- today there are 7-8 million women’s groups serving about 70-80 million rural families out of 160 million families which means half of rural families are linked to a MF Institution or Self Help Group. What this has done has empowered women now that they have control over money. That has been the first major shift or change where the power equation has changed, as earlier a wife depended on her husband for any expenditure whereas now she has her own money and own savings, so she can use that for family health and education. Besides managing money they are also interacting with their peers and many of them are members of the federations, they go for meetings at the district HQ, district collectors and because of such exposure, the rural women have gained confidence.

The second major change has been the Panchayati Raj (local governance system in villages) where the women got 30% reservations in Panchayats (the rural governing assemblies). That has created women leaders empowered in politics which is transforming rural India.

The third one is road connectivity. In the first fifty years since independence we only connected 40% of villages by roads in next ten years we connected another 30%. The pace of road connectivity has been very fast over the last ten years. Today except for very tiny villages almost most villages are connected by roads and once you get connected by road, it means that you then come into the mainstream economy. The produce can then reach the mandis (local markets) or other benefits such as if you wish to establish a school in the village then you can transport all kinds of materials that you need to build the school to the village. Road connectivity really transforms the village economically.

The fourth is that the overall awareness about education has gone up in the villages. Today if you talk to any rural women her priority number one is to educate her children. Before, they didn’t know that education could be such a differentiator.

The fifth change has been media penetration in rural India. There are more TV sets in rural India than in urban India in terms of sheer number. TV is seen like a family durable as it is seen to benefit everybody. TV gives them contact with the world.

The next big change has been technology, especially mobile connections. There are already 100 million connections in rural India out of 160 million families. By 2012 there will be more than 200 million mobile connections in rural India that means more than one connection per family. The mobile platform is now becoming universal for all kinds of information exchange whether it is Reuters Market Light or mandi prices or even monitoring health through tele-medicine. So information is becoming real time, therefore solutions have been much more impactful. So what is happening is that, what brick and mortar infrastructure couldn’t achieve because it wasn’t possible to go round to 600,000 villages, technology has suddenly made the world flat, as Friedman says.

Q. What are your thoughts on entrepreneurship and education in rural marketing?

Pradeep Kashyap: Government can’t be creating too many salaried jobs. 93% of our workforce is in informal sector.  We have immense numbers of young people and therefore the challenge is to how to create jobs through self employment and entrepreneurship. The government has recognised that.

We have initiated innovative models such as 3M and Inclusive Marketing. 3M is basically for large scale employment in rural areas. The first M stands for microfinance. To start any business you must have some money or access to capital. The second M stands for market because you’ll only be able to make profits if you are able to sell your products and there is demand for it for which you must have a market for it. And what we say that in the rural context the ‘hat’ (local village market) is the first access for poor people because they cannot jump straight from village to market in Kolkata, therefore the first access  they have is to the hat market. The third M is ‘Microplanning’ where you look at the kinds of raw materials available in that area, what are the kinds of skills people possess, because it would be best to start those activities for which people already have skills.

I have been championing entrepreneurship courses for the business school and I taught courses in XIM- Bhubaneswar in 1993 called ‘Start your own business’. XIMB was the second institution after IIMA which had this course. Now most of the B- schools have entrepreneurship courses. My whole premise was that MBA and business institutions produce job seekers but what we need are job creators. If they (MBA students) have been equipped with all this knowledge then they should take the risk and have the courage to start something on their own and provide employment. So that is what is needed.

Before, rural marketing was not taught in many business schools. I wrote the rural marketing book five years back and now we conduct courses on rural marketing in B-schools. In the meantime, rural markets also started expanding, corporates also started focussing on rural markets and hiring people with rural marketing background and management school saw a demand from companies and started to meet market demands.

Q. How do you see MART growing in future?

At MART we have been focussing on innovation. By and large we don’t like to do projects of same kinds and like to innovate with new kinds of projects. Learning is a continuous process and you never stop learning. Over the last 10 years we have enough data and enough experience about rural India. We have created a number of learning platforms such seminars on rural marketing, rural distribution, rural telecom, rural insurance. We are very clear that we will be in the emerging markets and we think whether it is the neighbouring countries like Bangladesh or countries like Brazil we will have a demand there. We are expanding our geography and we are also expanding our sectors. Earlier we were in marketing and livelihood, now we are in healthcare, agribusiness, insurance, banking and telecom. These are the opportunities that we see for ourselves.

Interview & compilation by,

Dr. Satya Prakash Dash

Centre for India & Global Business,

Cambridge Judge Business School

University of Cambridge

*Project Shakti <http://www.unilever.com/sustainability/casestudies/economic-development/creating-rural-entrepreneurs.aspx>

MART India <http://www.martrural.com/>