Mathura - Field visit

Spent last Thursday (Jan 22nd) in the field. Day started in Delhi at 5:00 am with Daniel (fellow Drishtee employee) and I trekking out to Mathura to spend the day with one of the delivery vans (which had no shocks to speak of) to get a first hand perspective of what the challenges are at the rural level.
Overall, I was amazed at how much they are doing just through hard work and perseverance. Starting from the stock room to the end delivery there is just chaos. The good aren't organized, and the guy in charge essentially just has everything in his head, and directs people about. There is no clear system of inventory management. Retailers aren't buying boxes or packets of stuff, but individual items (2 soaps, 5 cookie packets) so loose goods abound in the stock room.

Then Daniel and I spent the rest of the back breaking day in the back of a small truck making deliveries to different RRP's (rural retail points). Here is a sample picture of the roads we crossed. This was an open drain that had a makeshift "bridge" for cars to go over. In this case, our van of course couldn't make it and we had to hand deliver the goods.

It was interesting to see the laid back attitude of the village retailers. 55% felt it was no big deal to reduce the order at the time of delivery. Either they couldn't recall what they ordered, or they didn't have the money at hand to pay for the order. And the women retailers were clearly the most interested in growing their business, the men were just sort of content and laid back.
We visited 18 RRP's, out of which 2 canceled their orders. Our target for the day was Rs 25,000, we hit Rs 16,992. That's an average of Rs 1062/RRP (around $22). And the margins are razor thin, around 3%. There is just no way they can make money with this kind of efficiency and such low volumes. To be profitable they have to have a higher saturation of RRP's per route and need to quickly scale up. I think they are losing money right now. It's a volume business and they lack volume!
People are working 9+ hours a day and it's at a breaking point. Fortunately there are some clear solutions that we've seen that can help, and its exciting to have this kind of impact.
Ending this post with a picture of Dunkin Donuts coffee in a small retail shop in a village with a population of around 500 people. This is the kind of consumer product penetration in India today! There is demand, the market exists. Let's see who is the first to figure out how to service this demand.