Drishtee’s vision of self-sustaining social development at the grassroots informs all its endeavours.
It is Drishtee’s vision for sustainable communities that sets it apart from many other social enterprises working in the field. What makes it a visionary is not so much any grand idea, but in truth, the practical learning by doing spirit of the team behind it. Hence, there is no grandiose schema behind Drishtee’s endeavours. but a practical sense of purpose and an unwavering sense of focus. It is also strengthened by the founders’ can do spirit that has had them conquering every roadblock.
“The main objective of Drishtee is to try and create an impact,” says Siddhartha Shankar, President, Strategy & Business Development, Drishtee. There are NGOs that concentrate on the first method of achieving this objective—creating savings. There can be significant savings which are possible, concedes Shankar, but Drishtee has opted for the second and more sustainable way to create impact—by creating incomes. “We now focus on creating livelihoods. For that there are many things that you have to do along the way; one of the things you look at is creating accessibility.”
Dristee was floated in 1998-99 by Satyan Mishra, Nitin Gachhayat and Shailesh Thakur, three youths, who wanted to become entrepreneurs rather than take up regular jobs. Mishra, the co-founder and Managing Director of Drishtee is an Ashoka fellow and an MBA in International Business from Delhi School of Economics. With roots in rural Bihar, Mishra has a firm understanding of India’s rural landscape. He was nominated as ZDNet Asia’s Technopreneur of the Year later in 2006 and presently is a member of International Forums like Clinton Global Initiative and Young Asia 21 Forum of Rockefeller Foundation.
Thakur, the Strategic Thinker and Chief of Functions of Drishtee again brings a rural background with him. A graduate of Delhi University, he leads the new business team as Chief of New Ventures of Drishtee, while Gachhayat, a Masters in Business Administration from FORE School of Management, is and has been mainly involved with the functional teams responsible for developing new services and applications for rural India that can then be sold through Drishtee and other kiosk networks.
As Shankar says, the youths’ unusual choice of profession was beacause “all the three had rural connect and passion.”
Drishtee identifes and creates what it calls ‘milkman routes’ in a district through which it caters to a minimum of 20-25 villages by creating an ecosystem of microenterprises run by rural entrepreneurs with focus on women. The foundation of Drishtee is built on the principle of sustainability and not on a single bright concept with huge amounts at stake. It has been an evolutionary process and a journey of discovery for the outfit, which the founders built from scratch. The founders went to the grassroots for their lessons and improved and built on the basic premise learning from their mistakes.
The trio’s first major assignment was from the district collector of Dhar in Madhya Pradesh for digitisation of district records and implementation of government’s Government to Citizen Services (GTOC).
“This meant that they had to go to villages,” says Shankar, adding, “They did not have enough money, young as they were, to start on the big scale required.”
They did the next best thing. They went to the villages in search of entrepreneurs whom they could train for the project. They found school dropouts. After in-depth research, they selected boys who displayed a passion to serve the community. They trained these people offering them 80 per cent of their earnings; soon the services rolled. “The three youths realised quickly that they were creating huge value for the people of the village,” says Shankar. He explains, “Villagers have to undergo huge trouble and expense to get simple certificates like a birth certificate. They also have to stop work for some days. If they are provided such services for a fee, it saves them a lot of money and trouble.”
The services were a hit and gained recognition. It was also a sustainable service model as there were a number of villages requiring similar services. “If it is sustainable it can be replicated,” says Shankar and the three cofounders started replicating it. Word spread and Drishtee began getting invitations from other districts. “This was the first phase of evolution of Drishtee”, says Shankar. “It was the phase of e-governance.”
For Drishtee, technology plays a key role. As Shankar explains, “One of the significant issues in villages is access—to education, health, opportunity, information, etc. To create access you need to leverage tools like technology. That is the reason why technology plays a critical role for Drishtee.”
Thus, e-governance became a very interesting area, says Shankar adding, “It was a unique kind of e-governance. Nowhere else in the world was this kind of e-governance initiated. It was initially called GTOC.”
The second phase of Drishtee’s evolution involved the realisation that the sustainability of their e-governance project was on shaky grounds as bureaucratic transfers meant the end of the project in that particular district. But that did not spell the end of Drishtee. “We found interesting entrepreneurs in villages, some in a remote village who clicked photos and printed it in dot matrix and sold it for 50 paise,” says Shankar, taking us through the next phase of Drishtee’s growth. It was the phase of digital photo studio evolution. Drishtee encouraged village entrepreneurs to use digital cameras and inkjet printers. Now someone needing a passport-size photograph did not have to go to town.
But a bigger realisation for the organisation was the need for its own sustainability. “We realised that entrepreneurs’ sustainability was imperative; for Drishtee to be sustainable, the entrepreneurial chain had to be sustainable. This photo initiative was one of the measures,” says Shankar.
Digital photo service though doing well did not translate into a revenue sharing enterprise model for the enterprise. But there were small entrepreneurs who taught computers to children in villages. Soon Microsoft came forward and “We started teaching computers to village youth and that’s the historic connection with IT,” Shankar gives the reason for Drishtee’s strong IT foundation. Soon the organisation realised that there were farmers who had computer ambitions for their children. Drishtee brought to them a structured alternative. “It became a great service and we must have provided computer training to 60,000 to 70,000 students by now.”
The Microsoft experience gave them the realisation that Drishtee could be the platform for many private sector services. The next phase was the telecentre and kiosks phase of the platform. “We ensured there were private services, education photography, booking of tickets, etc. ICICI came forward and gave loan to our entrepreneurs. There were many services which each of these entreprenures could offer and these were services needed and desired by the community and led to savings for the farmers. This became a sustainable model and impressed the government.”
The Drishtee model came to be known as the common services centre and later was integrated with the government’s e-governance initiative. “We realised that the government was looking at our model because of its sustainability—economic and equally importantly, the social sustainability.”
However, Drishtee perceived the danger of becoming a subsidy model in this scheme of things. Around this time Mishra became an Ashoka Fellow and was exposed to Santa Clara University. The exposure brought Drishtee recognition and many people willing to help in their endeavour came forward.
Shankar who has been with Drishtee for eight years now, also joined around this time. He had left his corporate job of 24 years with ACC in search of a more fulfilling experience. His stint with United Nations too had left him dissatisfied. While working on rural marketing for ACC he had met Satyan and the latter invited Shankar to spend some time in the villages. “The experience humbled me and I decided to join the outfit,” says Shankar, adding “I haven’t looked back since.”
At this point Drishtee got into introspection mode with professional help pouring in. Shankar calls introspection the hallmark of the organisation. The group realised that they needed to be a rural based, dense organisation with a large number of services and products. As this new line of thinking dawned, they started linking up the kirana stores in remote villages to create a hybrid supply chain of services and products. This led to the third phase of growth—the endeavour to optimally utilise services.
“We targeted three ubiquitous services— computer education, financial inclusion and health.” Drishtee’s entry into finance and micro credit sector was accidental, says Shankar. “We were selling insurance for ICICI when we realised the importance of financial inclusion for farmers and later we became national business correspondents for SBI in this endeavour.”
Another round of introspection at this point made Drishtee realise that their platform was creating small impact for a large number of people as they were becoming a platform for partner companies. This gave birth to the 4C model where the big C is the community and the three Cs in the circle that connect to form the triangle are for—capacity for capacity building of the community; channel for linkages for enterprise to survive and capital to inject into the enterprise.
For now Drishtee is focussing on being a dense enterprise to create maximum impact in the areas where it operates. “We withdrew from places like Tamil Nadu, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh, but we are back in the latter. We focus on areas where we are strong. We are growing in Bihar. We look at opportunity and funding before going ahead,” says Shankar discussing Drishtee’s strategy. Today Drishtee partners with a number of public and private sector organisations in order expand its umbrella of sustainable services.
The solutions are aimed at holistic empowerment of the rural people by providing them education, health, livelihood, enterprise opportunities and goods and services at minimum cost.