Srei Sahaj e-Village Limited is a subsidiary of Srei Infrastructure Finance Limited which has been created under the Prime Minister Flagship National E Governance Plan. The objective of this organization is to bridge the digital divide between the rural and urban regions. It plans to do so by setting up Common Service Centres(CSCs) through selected states of India (Assam, Bihar, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal) and create a network of village level of entrepreneurs (VLEs). The digital services offered by these will be propogated in the villages through these VLEs.
Among the many services that Srei Sahaj has initiated in the rural villages, the newest service on the block is the online matrimonial website. The basic structure of the service currently is that the interested villager has to register himself on the Sahaj portal by approaching a VLE. He will obtain an id and password using which he will have to register himself on the Sahaj – Bharat Matrimony home page on the portal. The online profiles and procedures will be in English.
For verification of profiles, Bharat Matrimony will manually check the details of the profile and verify all the details put up via telecom. Bharat Matrimony has been coming up with many initiatives to enhance its user base and this is move to tap into the rural population of India. The online matrimony segment is a hot sector. To read up a recap of this space go here.
The cost structure has been designed such that the registration for the villager is free. Two packages will be offered to the villager after the registration stage. First package is a Sahaj BM Classic Membership package costing Rs. 499 for 3 months. Under this the villager will get phone numbers of 10 prospects on the BM site. The second package, Sahaj BM Classic Super Membership will cost Rs.999 for 6 months enabling access to 25 phone numbers. The incentive for a VLE to market the service among the villagers will be that he will receive Rs. 45 for every registration a commission of 10% on sale of a special package.
Srei Sahaj currently has 20,000 VLEs and is reaching out to 200 million rural people. It offers 30 services such as NREGA photograph, NREGA data collection, BSNL bill collection etc. It is planning to set up 28000 CSCs in Assam, Bihar, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.
Amidst the several necessary services that these centres offer, it remains to be seen how the conservative rural areas of India will respond to putting up marriage-relevant information on the website and actually accept proposals generated online. Since there are no comprehensive statistics or studies conducted regarding the demand of online matrimony help in the match making process of villagers, it is difficult to estimate the rural demand for this service.
Yet the performance based incentives for VLEs surely is a constructive feature which will hopefully make the whole process of getting the rural citizenry into the digital loop efficient and effective.What do you think?
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Aaksha Meghawat
Quelle/Source: WATBlog, 01.07.2010
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