Assam site visit - photo essay

This week has been a bit of a whirlwind, been traveling for the bulk of it. Flew to Guwahati in Assam on Tuesday morning, spent 4-5 hours in the car getting to Sonitpur (the district office). Got there at 8 pm. Spent the next day going out on the delivery route to observe the supply chain delivery process in Assam. 120 km's, starting at 9 am and getting back to the office at 8 pm. And then on Thursday, we leave at 6 am, reaching Delhi at 8 pm that night. It took me 2 1/2 hours to fly from Assam to Delhi and then 2 hours to get through traffic to get to my place from the airport. Out of 72 hours, I spent 30 hours traveling.
Even though I didn't have much time for touristy sight-seeing, going back to Assam was nice. People in Assam were so much more friendlier that Mathura. Drishtee also seems to have a much bigger presence in this state. And the entrepreneurs there really want to engage you in how they can do better. People asking for micro finance loans, discussing new products they'd want us to supply or trying to figure out how they can market their services better. It was great, they were truly entrepreneurial.

On the other hand, the delivery process I observed - not so great. They have only one route, and I can see why. I thought Mathura was disorganized, but these guys are even further behind. The stock room had goods scattered everywhere, with no organization whatsoever.

The normal process is for someone to call the RRP's (rural retail points) and take down the delivery orders the day before. This way when the vans go out, they know what specific goods to take. Not how it works in Assam. These guys had no delivery orders, instead they almost took a mini version of the entire stock room! Given how bad the roads are, its nuts to take so many unnecessary items out and expose them to the jarring journey. And just imagine the inventory reconciliation process at the end of the day, nuts!
Loading the van in the morning -

It was great to go into the hinterland of Assam, even though I was in a 3 wheeler, squeezed up in front on a seat meant for 1 person being shared by 3 of us (driver, delivery executive and me). I spent the entire journey gripping on for dear life, while the delivery executive sat comfortably on the other side, like it was no big thing to almost get thrown out of a moving van every 3 seconds. I tried sitting like him, relaxing my posture and not holding on to anything. Lets just say after the first small bump in the road, I quickly changed my mind.
This is what the 3 wheeler looks like. Gautam is the delivery executive in the blue shirt, with the driver standing next to him.

At some points the road was pretty good -

At others not so good -

We got to a point where they were constructing the road we were driving on. I am particularly amused by the picture above, because at the hedge fund I worked at we were fond of saying working there is like driving at 80mph while they are building the road under us. Here we were literally driving on roads that were getting constructed under us! The van had to take a detour at this point and get into the neighboring fallow fields and go around the trucks. Eventually we had turn around on this path because the road ahead was just not passable. So we end up a diff "road" that is in a much worse state of disrepair. And what do you think happens? Our 3 wheeler gets stuck in the mud. Had to get out and push. If it wasn't for the enthusiastic bunch of school kids that saw us stuck, I don't think we'd have made it out. That's the other thing - wherever we went if there were kids around they would swarm to our van and just stare at what we were doing. Always the center of attention, wherever we went.
To give you guys a sense of how rural this supply chain is, I took this picture of one of the villages we service. It has 1 school, and no electricity. We got there around 1ish. It is as calm and peaceful as it looks. Hard to believe that this place has been suffering from separatist violence for decades now. But with the huge military presence in the area, it's hard to forget this reality.

Ended the day at around 8pm at night. I can't imagine having to come back the next morning for a similar routine the next day. But these delivery guys and drivers do it everyday. Here is a before and after picture of the delivery van. It's crazy that the van returned with more than half the goods it went out with. At Mathura, in contrast, they would come back with maybe 1 or 2 boxes of products.





We visited 12 RRP's (1 was closed) and sold goods worth Rs. 10,067 (~$200). This was less than what we made in Mathura per RRP and we had spent more time in the field. I didn't think it possible to be more inefficient than the Mathura operations. Wrong! I also spent time understanding microfinance and the education operations here. Will leave that for another post though.