What is it that you're doing Rahil?

I owe you guys a bit of information about what I will be doing at Drishtee. Originally the plan was for me to get involved in the finance or education vertical and help them analyze/redesign their business process. Plans changed.

Just some background about Drishtee first.
Drishtee has created a network of rural entrepreneurs and the basic value Drishtee provides is the vital link between manufacturers and the rural retail owners (kirana stores in Hindi). And when I say rural, I'm talking about villages that big distributors ignore (even by the likes of Reliance). As an aside the numbers here are staggering. There are 600,000 villages across India (accounting for 70% of the population). Out of these 100,000 can be labeled as medium size villages, having an average of 1000 households. Household income ranges from Rs 3000 - Rs 5000 per month (that's around $50). This is a market of at least $10-$15 billion dollars (this is a conservative number). Now all someone needs to do is figure out creative ways to link up and provide value. And from the little I have seen, the way people are using technology to bridge this is pretty exciting.

Anyways - back to what I am doing for Drishtee. Drishtee plans to scale up to become sustainable but can't because it's existing supply chain process is paper based, data entry intensive and error prone (the error rate is whats killing them). I am basically trying to find a solution to this problem. Can't really use the existing Supply Chain Management (SCM) solutions, because there is generally no internet access, no computers etc. - very poor infrastructure in general. So something that is cell phone based, with maybe some portable printers. And it has to be easy to use - the guys in the field aren't "tech savvy". We also want to find ways for the finance vertical to leverage this model (think mobile wallets - pay with your cell phone etc.). The ultimate goal is to get all the different verticals at Drishtee on to one SCM backbone. Cell phone's have really opened up a broad array of opportunities for the rural landscape in India. Right now the overhead in the retail space is too high to make the operation sustainable, and Drishtee wants to figure out a way to create a sustainable model here.

So the project is essentially - to research options, run field studies, make recommendations and then run a pilot. All in the span of 5 months.

It doesn't sound too complicated, but I have no clue what I'm talking about. This Friday I go to the district office in Mathura, to participate in the "block manager" training and then on Saturday I get a glimpse of what it is like for an executive to spend a day in the field going from one rural retail point to the next. I've been warned it's going to be a long and rough day. Stay tuned...