Mobile Applications for Rural India

Abstract

Some of the most notable rural mobile applications attempt to improve rural livelihood productivity by making information available to farmers and fishermen on market prices, weather forecasts and other critical news, while mobile banking targets the unbanked and under banked rural populations. Corporations which have spearheaded these rural mobile applications have diverse core competence, like Thomson Reuters’ reliable and critical information, Tata Telecom is the leading telecom service provider and Iffco is a premier fertilizer company, EKO and FINO are startups. Do these companies believe that developing mobile applications for rural communities in India is “Innovations at the Bottom of the Pyramid which will be Core Drivers of the next practices” (Pralhad, 2005)? With their initial limited experience of mobile applications for rural India how did these companies set about understanding the needs of the rural people and developing mobile applications? This paper makes an in depth study of two best in class rural mobile application initiatives, i.e., Reuters Market Light and EKO by studying the situation, the actors, and the process. The learning from case study of these two companies is used to develop a framework for successful implementation of rural mobile applications targeted at rural India and strategizes how these can make more of an impacted if scaled up.