Thousands of NGOs and development organisations across India interact with the grassroots everyday – with people, their influencers, their local leaders and government bodies – as part of their programmes. Only with the right communication, can awareness gaps of people be bridged, consensus built, information exchange established across different stakeholders, and people motivated for change. Helping development organisations in their communications requirements has been one of Mobile Vaani’s critical offerings: we have worked with over 100 organizations so far including CREA on spreading the word in local communities in Jharkhand about reservation for women in Panchayati Raj Institution elections; Enable India to reach thousands of people with disabilities in rural Karnataka; PACS and their cadre of community level workers (mitras) to spread awareness about the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana; and many more. Communication platforms such as Mobile Vaani can enhance development interventions by reinforcing messages and helping the right stakeholders interact with each other.

However, communication alone is not sufficient and there is a significant need for consistent and continuous monitoring of programme implementation, to ensure the programme can be modified as required to be more effective. Designing monitoring systems – that allow for monitoring and modification of the programme while it is ongoing – has to be an integral part of its design. Such feedback loops in programmes designed by development organisations often tend to be delayed and anecdotal however, based on feedback from occasional field visits and internal reviews. Can technology platforms be used to get quick feedback, and modify the strategy if needed?

Here’s where Mobile Vaani can help too: going beyond just engagement with target audience groups and related stakeholders, to leverage the communication to incorporate effective monitoring both during and after the implementation.

 

 

What can the Mobile Vaani platform do for you?

Using the platform in over 20 districts in rural central India for four+ years now with more than 10,000 users calling daily into the platform, we have gained rich experience in engaging with various levels of grassroots communities to enable the information collection capabilities at scale in grassroots development interventions. Here are a few examples of how the we are enhancing the Mobile Vaani platform to strengthen interventions, expand their reach and measure their results effectively.

How the platform helped in programme design

An example would be our work with a telecom major who approached us to check if there was scope for an electronic marketplace for selling farm output. To identify this, we ran a two-week survey, whose results told us that the bigger need for farmers was an electronic marketplace to rent tractors or trade agricultural tools (2 out of 3 farmers in our catchment area rented equipment, according to our survey). The recent establishment of FarMart, a startup that has just received funding, proves that our survey identified a critical gap.

In another research project, we helped identify the right stakeholders to engage on a social issue. We worked with a large development organisation who wanted to raise awareness of government benefits under the Janani Suraksha Yojana among expecting women. A quick survey on the Mobile Vaani platform indicated that the problem was not lack of awareness (67 percent of respondents were aware of government’s antenatal care benefits) but people’s trust in the quality of the government centres where they could avail these benefits. These results helped frame the design of the project not so much in terms of awareness, but rather as a social accountability intervention which collected data on the quality of care and infrastructure in health facilities, which was then forwarded to the local government and administrative authorities for action. The reports were also featured in major regional media dailies, and led to the improvement of several facilities that impacted thousands of people.

 

Using the platform to concurrently track effectiveness

The Mobile Vaani platform also enabled Knowledge-Attitude-Perception tracking for a campaign on maternal health. Our surveys at the beginning and end of an Oxfam programme ‘For the Mothers’ in 2015 helped us identify how users’ perceptions around various aspects related to maternal health changed through the campaign. This was followed up with a recall survey to see whether campaign messages were retained in people’s minds.

 

Through our platform, we can reach ‘media dark’ areas and try to bridge the gap left by communication that relies on mass media. For instance, Mobile Vaani’s IVR system was used to engage in real time the audience of the TV series Main Kuchh Bhi Kar Sakti Hoon (MKBKSH), an entertainment-education programme to promote gender equality and address social issues run by the Population Foundation of India. The IVR was used to reach audience members from media dark areas with information from the series and enabled them to provide feedback, listen to curated content and record opinions on several social issues. Over 1.7 million calls were received from 29 Indian states, proving the series’s audience engagement and positive actions taken by viewers thanks to the series, which helped PFI use the IVR system as a barometer to understand mindset changes the TV serial had brought about.

 

 

 

Comparing the effectiveness of different strategies

Our platform also has the capability of A/B testing: comparing two routes (of communication, action, etc.) to see which performs better. We used this in our own analysis of financial incentive structures for Mobile Vaani volunteers, wherein we tested two sets of volunteer payment methods in different ‘clubs’ of Mobile Vaani. In some clubs, we implemented a group incentive structure where the volunteers were paid equally but based on the performance of the group, and in the other clubs we implemented an individual based incentive structure based on the performance of each volunteer. We found that individual payments however led to disputes and poor performance of the clubs overall ; group payments, on the other hand, were distributed evenly among volunteers, and peer pressure and collective accountability ensured that there were no freeloaders. Clubs following the group based structures had call volumes almost four times that of other clubs on average, and grew much more quickly at a lower cost per user acquisition. Coupled with other observations to strengthen our selection process of volunteers, we came up with the following structure which shows how monetary, purposive, solidarity, and social incentives come together nicely in group structures to lead to extremely dynamic clubs.

Upcoming capabilities

Mobile Vaani’s capabilities will be further enhanced with our recent innovations, notably the introduction of our hybrid app + IVR strategy,
which will allow staff from development organisations to run demography and baseline/endline data collection surveys through the app, and run regression analysis to explain the observed effects based on the demography and user participation on the platform.

We are also overlaying census data, satellite data, National Family Health Survey data and government Management Information Systems (MIS) into our platform to help understand how macro socio-economic parameters influence the programme’s implementation and outcomes. For instance, when working in three panchayats for one of our recent programmes, we observed that traction in one panchayat was double the other two; when correlated with census data, we saw that this was the poorest community among the three surveyed – it had the most number of houses with thatched roofs, the least accessibility to drinking water and electricity within its premises.

 

In the weeks since the Kisan Long March, we at Mobile Vaani reached out to farmers in Bihar to ask what were the biggest issues they faced and what their demands of the government would be.

Unsurprisingly, most of the farmers talked about the Minimum Support Price, the MSP. Of how it is not sufficient, or of how it is meaningless outside the few government procurement options which have to buy farmers’ crop at MSP, or of how it extends to far fewer crops than it should.

The manifestations of MSP not being an efficient system was mostly seen in terms of whom farmers sold their harvest to, especially in the case of paddy and wheat, which are the crops procured the most by the government each year. As a part of the country’s rice bowl, Bihar is expected to be a significant contributor in paddy procurement each year, and Primary Agricultural Credit Societies, or PACS, are highly promoted by ministers in Bihar as a one-stop, credible venue where farmers can sell paddy or, recently, wheat.

No wonder, PACS came up often when farmers who spoke with us through Mobile Vaani discussed the issues they are facing. PACS is high on visibility, with government leaders ranging from the state’s Chief Minister to the Deputy Chief Minister to the cooperative minister urging farmers to sell their crop there and promising strict action should PACS fail to deliver.

Keeping with farmers’ concerns, we also circled back with officers working at various capacities in PACS centres or at the block level.

What are PACS?

Primary Agricultural Credit Societies, of which Bihar has 8,463, are farmer-members-operated cooperatives that are given credit by cooperative banks (funded by state governments) to help farmers borrow money for capital improvement or to tide through losses, as well as a one-stop shop for high-quality seeds, fertilisers and other inputs, and most importantly, as a government-authorised and accountable venue for selling paddy and wheat. Upon procurement of the crop, especially in the case of paddy, it goes to the Bihar State Food & Civil Supplies Corporation, and then on to the Food Corporation of India, who direct it to the Public Distribution System. Payment is expected to reach the farmer within 48 hours of selling the crop at PACS, and the system has recently been digitised to make it easy for land-owning farmers as well as sharecroppers or tenant-farmers (those who farm on leased land) to sell their crop without difficulties related to producing documentation.

While farmers have a litany of complaints regarding PACS and its functioning, speaking with PACS officials and block officials reveals that these farmer cooperatives have struggles of their own to surmount before they can pass on benefits to their fellow farmers. The rest of this article discusses farmers’ opinions and experiences related to PACS, and responses by PACS officials to these.

Ground realities: PACS, procurement and payments

 

Listen to Rakesh Kumar’s opinion here:

Listen to Ravinder Kumar’s opinion here:

Listen to Bhola Prasad’s opinion here:

Listen to Sanjay Kumar’s opinion here:

Listen to Amresh’s opinion here:

Listen to Nikhilesh Kumar’s opinion here:

Another issue that farmers did not bring up, but was discussed by Arun Kumar, PACS official of Khoksha village, Khatiyama panchayat in Nalanda district, relates to the moisture content of the paddy that can be procured. The limit is 17%, but the content of moisture in most grains is higher, which means farmers whose crop don’t meet this criterion have no choice but to sell to traders. There have been several discussions on raising the moisture content criterion in the state, as paddy and wheat grown in Bihar are typically of a moister variety.

Listen to Arun Kumar’s opinion here:

Listen to Manohar Singh’s opinion here:

Listen to Ram Kumar Prasad’s opinion here:

Listen to Shivanth’s opinion here:

This requirement for non-landholding farmers mentioned by Sanjay Kumar seems to have been in place since November 2016, as this news report from The Times of India shows.

Where gaps need to be filled 

We see several gaps when it comes to what PACS is meant to do and how it serves farmers, especially small farmers.

The biggest gap seems to be in communication. Many farmers don’t know when they can go to PACS, or that even tenant farmers can get on to the PACS system by registering themselves with some easy-to-obtain documentation. Chandeshwar Ram Chandu from Madhubani district mentions how during awareness camps that the state government mandates are held in different blocks, party workers just bring their cronies to show attendance and farmers who need the information the most end up not knowing about government schemes or other important announcements.

Our biggest learning from running Mobile Vaani is the power of the mobile phone that can be leveraged for hyperlocal communication. For one, projects run on Mobile Vaani demonstrate that it can easily be used to make people aware of PACS’s policies and its functioning, as we have done with many areas related to agriculture. Additionally, PACS can make use of ICT systems to inform its members and other farmers in its catchment area on details such as the MSP and when procurement is expected to happen through a simple SMS system. This will help improve transparency, as has been successfully implemented with the public distribution system in states such as Tamil Nadu and Chattisgarh[1], where people can know whether the stocks claimed by the ration shopkeeper are legitimate.

Funding crunches defeat the purpose of PACS, as they do not have sufficient working capital to pay farmers without having to wait for funds to come to them from their associated banks. This issue is also seen in the broader space of Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) – legal entities formed by farmers to facilitate financing and disseminate information about the market/technology/inputs, among other things – even though several vehicles finance them, such as National Bank for Agricultural and Rural Development (NABARD) and the Small Farmers’ Agribusiness Consortium (SFAC). There needs to be a bigger, concerted move towards lending more to these institutions, directly to the FPOs/PACS, or through these vehicles.

Finally, delays in payment transfers seem to be a common issue among several government schemes, notably the NREGA[2]. Aadhaar verifications or cashless innovations have not been effective in these circumstances, as they only compound the matter further – such as by payments being stopped because spellings in bank accounts and Aadhaar cards don’t match. As well as setting up a separate credit facility that can directly release verified payments quickly – as described in the previous paragraph – another solution that can be explored is to create sufficient buffers at different points at the state level so that these cushion any delays that happen in state vehicles sending funds to these organisations. This way, payments will go on time to the farmer, and credit will flow to the required buffers once it comes through.

An overall strengthening of the functioning of MSP can perhaps reduce farmers’ reliance on PACS by offering more avenues where farmers can sell their crops. Last year, CPI (M) rooted for the idea of Right to MSP, as well as an annual review of MSP that will offer a higher rate for farmers.

Farmers who shared their thoughts with Mobile Vaani were disappointed with the implementation of many schemes even as they recognised that successive governments have been trying various ways to improve farmers’ lives and strengthen agriculture. With protests – and suicides – by farmers only increasing in frequency and intensity, it remains to be seen when half of India’s workforce will get its dues.

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[1] http://www.righttofoodindia.org/data/pds/December_2011_revival_of_pds_evidence_explanations_reetika_5_november_2011.pdf

[2] https://thewire.in/economy/nrega-payment-delay

by Vani Viswanathan

Not only are wages in the country low in general, women get even lower wages than men. As opinions from listeners of Mobile Vaani show, this makes it difficult for women to contribute better in running their households, and could also be a disincentive keeping women from seeking employment.

Over the past year, we have been grappling with why women’s participation in the labour force has dropped from 35% in 1991 to 27% in 2017. This is especially confusing since the 2011 National Sample Survey found that one-third of women in urban India and half of the women in rural India – who are engaged mainly in housework – want paying jobs. Some experts have pointed that this is expected in an economy where women are gradually pursuing higher education or are not “required” to work because income levels have stabilised. But others have highlighted the role of social norms: women’s responsibilities at the home front, and the “shame” that comes with having a working woman in the family, while others look at how appropriate opportunities are not available, be it for women with medium levels of education, or for those looking for labour-intensive agriculture and non-agriculture activities.

Speaking from Kharijama village in Chandi block, Bihar, all of 50 kilometres from the state capital Patna, Meena Devi is probably not aware of these macroeconomic discussions around participation of women such as herself in India’s economy. An agricultural labourer, she is up in arms against the fact that she is paid only 200 rupees while men get 400-500 rupees for the same work on the farm.

“When I ask the landowner why they are paying me less, they said that women work less than men, and so we must receive at least 50 rupees than men for the same work.”

Meena Devi is one of the millions who listen to Mobile Vaani, which has 20 rural clubs in Bihar, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh, and urban clubs in Delhi/NCR, Indore (Madhya Pradesh), and Chennai and Dindigul (Tamil Nadu). Over the last few months, we have been encouraging more women (and men) to speak up about wage discrimination due to gender, and here we discuss some of their responses.

Wage labour in India is particularly exploitative: not only are low wages the norm, women get the worse end of it, both in informal and formal sectors. Low wages could deter women from taking up work – if women have to fight social norms and cultural strictures just to get a job that pays them poorly, many might not find it worth their effort. On the other hand, given the distressingly low incomes that force women to work, women enter the vicious circle of accepting low wages as they want any income they can get.

Listen to Meena Devi’s opinion here:

“Women and men are made differently”

Even as the NSSO states that wage discrimination in the informal sector has reduced, at 20%, this difference between pay for women and men is still large. Importantly, this figure does not include significant portions of work related to agriculture, which employs 60% of Indian women in the workforce. Studies have shown that wage discrimination due to gender is much higher in the informal sector in India, with the study ‘Wage Discrimination in India’s Informal Labour Markets: Exploring the Impact of Caste and Gender’ highlighting that the agriculture sector is perhaps one of the worst offenders.

True to form, several men who responded to Mobile Vaani’s prompt to our Jharkhand listeners about wage discrimination between women and men, said that it is unfair to expect women to be paid the same as men when “clearly, they are not capable of working as hard as men”. Some relied on the simplistic argument of women’s bodies being made differently from men. One of them wondered, “A farmer ploughs the land, does a woman do that? Why, then, should she get the same pay?”

Even as we should question the use of the word “farmer” to refer to a man only, other men and women who shared their opinions actively challenged these ideas, stating that even if women’s bodies are made differently, there was no difference in their capabilities with regard to farm labour, or their outputs in the field.

“Our patriarchal society is the reason behind women getting less wages than men for the same work,” shared one listener, urging the government to come up with laws and regulations to ensure equal wages for equal work. Another wondered that it was unfortunate that this situation prevails to this day, 70 years after the country’s independence.

Listen to men talking about women receiving lower wages here:

Women who spoke to Mobile Vaani highlighted the many ways in which this was unfair: besides the outright discrimination, this ignored the fact that women had to run households with less money, something that especially got critical in women-headed households. And women-headed households are increasingly growing in number, thanks no less to the massive rural outmigration of men due to declining agricultural incomes and a higher focus on services and manufacturing.

Listen to Vrinda Devi talking about women’s double burden of managing home and employment, and the difficulty with earning lower wages than men for the same work:

Migration, informal labour and wage exploitation

Over the last decade, women’s migrating has increased significantly. The number of women migrating for work increased by 101% from 2001 to 2011 – double the rate of men’s migration, which increased 49%. Urban areas, which have grown to accommodate nearly one-third of Indian citizens, employ large numbers of women under exploitative circumstances, especially in the construction and garments industries.

Shabana, living in Kapashera, Delhi, is a migrant woman in one such enterprise. Pushed to migrate to Delhi from Muzaffarpur, Bihar, Shabana cuts thread for a garments business on a contractual basis. In her list of complaints – ranging from the irregularity of the work to the irrational prices for utilities that her landlord imposes – is the fact that men get more money for the same work she does: 260 rupees for 10 hours of cutting thread, compared to the 200 rupees that she gets.

“Contracts are erratic; even payment under these contracts varies from 180 rupees to 200 or 220 for the same work. I get work for 10 days a month, at most. If I could get a job directly with the company, I would get a higher salary.”

Many women – and men – echoed these thoughts about the exploitative wage and employment terms in casual labour. Several men spoke with Mobile Vaani about women being made to work overtime (and not compensated for these), working till nights even over the weekends. “Their factory gates are locked so that they don’t leave,” said Vinod, also from Kapashera, Delhi. Sunita from Noida, Uttar Pradesh described that when she took up a new job, her employers told her that she would be paid after eight days for her work, but her colleagues at her new workplace told her that many of them hadn’t been paid even for a month. “I left the job the very next day,” she said.

Most of these women are migrants to Delhi from various parts of northern India, signalling distress migration due to their inability to afford two square meals a day. Even though Shabana is struggling with the notorious lack of regulation in the urban casual labour economy, her life, it seems, is better because of her migration to Delhi. “I had to migrate because it was getting difficult to run the household back in Bihar. My child was going hungry for days together. Here, at least I am able to contribute to the household expenses…”

Listen to Shabana’s opinions here:

What is the way forward?

The Code on Wages, 2017 was introduced in the Lok Sabha in August 2017, proposing minimum wages which states can define. This drew swift resistance from trade unions for proposing to make redundant several existing wage/labour laws, including the Equal Remuneration Act, 1976, and replacing them with diluted provisions.

At Gram Vaani, in the meantime, we are working at several levels to attempt to reduce incidences of wage discrimination due to gender. At villages, for instance, we have created a pool of volunteers who assist women in the legal/bureaucratic process to claim their entitlements. In several cities and towns such as Delhi and the extended National Capital Region, Indore, Chennai, Dindigul and Tirupur, we have partnered with local unions and activists to give low-wage industrial workers a voice. This project, Brochure_shramik vaani v2, has platforms in each of these cities/towns that enable sharing of information related to laws and entitlements, help with filing complaints by creating a pool of volunteers and drive collective action.

While we work on laws, entitlements and awareness, this needs to be accompanied by attitude change on the ground.  Quite a few of the men from Jharkhand who shared their thoughts on Mobile Vaani believed that women just have to be louder and bolder in asking for equal wages; they did not question the men who were contributing to the issue in the first place. We know from our female listeners’ opinions that they do ask, but they are shut down, or in some cases, beaten up or fired, when they do so. Equal pay for equal work is a human – and constitutional – right, and women shouldn’t have to fight this battle alone.

In the next article in this series, we will examine the various issues that women face as employees in garments industries in cities across India.

• An anganwadi worker says that food grains received in the centre haven’t been distributed to children and mothers it serves.
• Over 5,000 farmers haven’t received their insurance pay-outs from the government.
• A villager has been desperately trying for seven years to transfer land ownership from his deceased father’s name to his name.
• An illegal alcohol shop refuses to shut down despite complaints from neighbourhood residents.

What is common among these three stories from different parts of Bihar, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh, is that community volunteers associated with Mobile Vaani helped mobilise community action to resolve these issues.

And this is an idea that we believe has tremendous potential to be scaled up: having organised and trained community volunteers leverage simple technology to help people in far-flung, media-dark parts of India to have their grievances heard and issues resolved, create dialogue about social norms that are taken for granted and policies whose implications are hard to understand, and contextualize the use of technology for local needs.

The nuts and bolts of how it works

Operating in 25 districts across Bihar, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh, Mobile Vaani (MV) uses a simple IVRS technology to present locally relevant, multi-stakeholder information and views to nearly 100,000 users each month.

Users can listen to information related to social issues (such as on maternal health, early and child marriage, etc.), government schemes and local news, as well as record their opinions on these topics and share grievances related to their communities or their families.

Supporting this system is a network of 200 community-based volunteers and reporters, who are trained to report on locally relevant matters, publicize the MV platform and catalyze community action to solve local problems by bringing issues to the attention of relevant stakeholders. These volunteers are organized into clubs that operate at the district level and take ownership of their local MV platforms. They are responsible for building up the community user base, understand the needs of their communities, and support them in solving problems. Today, there are 13 such clubs across the 3 states in which MV operates.

There are several ways the volunteers ensure accountability and issue resolution: they forward messages from the MV platform to relevant local stakeholders to escalate problems and bring attention; they attend open-house events organized by local officials and politicians and take a commitment for assured action; they collate information through surveys and mobilize support through petitions which are shared with stakeholders to initiate systemic changes, they work with community leaders to hold local events and campaigns to questions social norms, and they train people by identifying relevant use-cases for new and empowering technologies like digital payments and various Internet platforms.

All this action is predominantly offline, undertaken in-person, which has been our most important learning on how technology platforms need to be supplemented with people.

Image: Dipanjan Chakraborty[1]

Empowering community volunteers: The next step

Mobile Vaani envisions strengthening the local clubs into true community institutions that can represent their community’s interests to governance stakeholders and lead to positive actions and resolution of community members’ issues.

This combination of community-level action by volunteers from the community who are empowered through far reaching technology platforms has the potential to be a one-of-its-kind citizen engagement and bottom-up media platform that spurs community action.

We believe that media should not stop at collecting and providing credible information, but should go further to ensure that the information leads to change.

Why are such decentralized institutions important?

Decentralized – local, for-and-by-the-community –  institutions have been demonstrated as making the difference in strengthening state accountability and ensuring government services efficiently reach the people they are to benefit.

Decentralized collective action in Tamil Nadu in the 1970s forms the core of S. Vivek’s book ‘Delivering public services effectively: Tamilnadu and Beyond.’ Vivek argues that basic public services such as schools, child care, mid-day meals, public distribution and public health function remarkably well in the state, and are much better than other states in the country[2]. He attributes much of this to decentralized collective action that rose in the state in the 1970s, demanding accountability from local governance officials[3]. Vivek believes that these movements laid the foundation for a strong policy focus on delivery of public services that continues to this day.

Shifting the scene to present-day India, Dipanjan Chakraborty[1], a PhD candidate at IIT Delhi, analyzed the functioning of centralized helplines (phone and web-based) created for people to report grievances related to government schemes. Several issues were identified in the functioning of these helplines: people weren’t able to access/use them and collect the information required to file a complaint, they felt intimidated about speaking with a government official and often, didn’t know how to track the progress of their complaint. Most importantly, the helpline operators had low accountability to the people to attend to their grievances. Although a vibrant civil society exists in the country attempting to help citizens represent their concerns to relevant local stakeholders, these civil society members are cut off from centralized helplines.

The authors, based on a pilot with Mobile Vaani, have noted several ways by which civil society members are more empowered to help with issue resolution: their personal contacts with relevant local stakeholders, their influence at the local level and their ability to pull in media to put pressure on stakeholders for resolution.

Noting that the government recognizes the importance of civil society organizations in grievance redressal and information sharing, the authors recommend that a civil society layer of technology should be added to the centralized grievance redressal process, so that these civil society members are formally brought into the process. In essence, technology will add decentralization to a system that might otherwise be distant and disconnected from the very citizens it seeks to serve. India has an extremely strong civil society and culture for social work, who can contribute even more effectively for their community’s development with the help of a localized community media platform.

The Mobile Vaani community institutions model

Mobile Vaani envisages that its clubs will be converted into community based institutions that function along the following lines:

• The organization will have members from communities (who join by paying a nominal fee), and will be run by officials elected from and by the membership base.
• Sponsorship will be obtained for non-commercial activities such as promoting relevant government schemes, running membership drives, organizing community events, consultations with local stakeholders, etc.
• The revenues from such projects will be used towards covering costs like institution building, community mobilization and human resource, among others, thereby ensuring financial sustainability.
• Gram Vaani will support in setting up the community organization, provide technical, financial and capacity building assistance, and help with procuring projects for financial sustainability.

Activities that these organizations can engage in include reporting community level issues (such as implementation of schemes, infrastructure gaps) and individual grievances, bring together communities with local stakeholders to resolve community issues, improve accountability of local governance processes (such as ensuring Gram Sabha meetings are regularly held), develop local events and campaigns on social issues, sharing good practices on agriculture and finance. We believe that if communities are happy with the community organizations’ work in representing their concerns and the community, they will support, and contribute to, its functioning.

Listen to some recordings of Gram Vaani impact here:

 

Gaurang wants to know what is the process for getting a loan from a Microfinance Institution. Radha wonders why nearly one month since her application for a loan it hasn’t come through, while Komal asks why, when she applied for a loan for 50,000 rupees, she only got 35,000.

The Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) sector in India has evolved since its early days as solely not for profit with a strong social focus, to have organisations that are now finance companies in their own right. Strongly supported by the government for their role in serving hitherto-unreached bottom of the pyramid rural consumers, many for-profit MFIs today are recognised as Non-Banking Finance Corporations (NBFCs).

MFIs have gone through their share of ups and downs over the last year. Demonetisation is said to have had an impact on borrowers’ ability to repay loans and loans and sector growth has slowed down even as business has grown in the first quarter of FY 2017-18 compared to the same period last year.

While several macroeconomic factors have a role in this scenario, what this – and the questions from Guarang, Radha and Komal quoted above – demonstrates is the need for regular engagement with their clients to clarify doubts, hear grievances and pass on information about products and how they work. This engagement is critical to ensuring clients know what they are getting into, and can do their best to repay their loans, but also for MFIs to understand their clients, their needs and motivations better. Could technology play a role in facilitating this engagement?

In its paper ‘Shifting trends in the microfinance ecosystem’, PwC cites several ways in which digitisation and the usage of technology can especially help MFIs understand their clients better and engage with them, especially to gather information about them and develop campaigns that address specific needs of different client segments. This information, the paper argues, “can help MFIs in achieving their growth objective by helping them in increasing their geographical outreach and product offerings, generating better consumer insights and enhancing sales force productivity.”

Punji ki Kunji, available on the number +91 92505 00111, is an opportunity for this engagement to happen between MFIs and their clients at no cost to the client.

Punji ki Kunji was started as a pilot in collaboration with Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) and Sa-Dhan, an association of organisations that provide community development financing, including for-profit and non-profit MFIs and Non Banking Financial Corporations (NBFCs).

In June-July this year, 5,000 people from Bihar made over 30,000 calls to Punji ki Kunji to learn about their rights as customers of Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) and how loans from MFIs work, and to share their experiences and grievances in accessing or borrowing from MFIs.

The collaboration between Mobile Vaani and Sa-Dhan began with field visits in Hazaribagh and Patna to understand community perceptions of what they want to know about taking loans from MFIs and what support they required. The field visits showed the need for deeper engagement with people in rural India. Potential and current clients often did not know how their loans and repayments worked, their rights and responsibilities as clients of MFIs, as well as their role and responsibilities in a Joint Liability Group (JLG). Additionally, field research showed that the clients felt their relationship with MFIs could be more than simply giving them loans in times of need.

In a nutshell, our field interactions showed that there was space for information exchange between MFIs and clients, for education about loans and repayments – we had the potential to strengthen awareness of clients regarding MFIs and create a difference in the lives of borrowers and their families.

Based on these insights, Mobile Vaani decided to develop and pilot Punji ki Kunji with an MFI as partner in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, where the MFI has a substantial client base and a significant number of branch offices.

The service was developed keeping in mind three objectives:
1. to convey information about industry code of conduct (rights and responsibilities of borrowers)
2. to share entertainment content on how MFIs can be beneficial to people in need
3. to collect information about their experiences from those who have borrowed from MFIs

Initiating this service required substantial groundwork: we had to work with MFI officers stationed in the district to train them on the service so that they could spread the word among their clients about it and encourage them to take the surveys to collect information about their experiences.

In a pilot in June-July 2017, close to 30,000 calls were received in the Muzaffarpur district from 5,000 callers. Each caller, on an average, called back on the number six times, indicating that they were keen to come back to Punji ki Kunji for more information. Here are some highlights from the two surveys taken on the platform, one gauging client satisfaction with MFIs (345 completed responses) and another on clients’ experiences being part of JLGs (255 completed responses).

These results have the potential to spur ideas for MFIs to consider how they can strengthen their work with their clients for a long lasting and mutually beneficial relationship. It also offers an opportunity for success stories from clients to be featured on the platform, giving more prospective clients information and feedback on the MFI. Additionally, the insights help Sa-Dhan as a Self-Regulating Organisation stay on top of client satisfaction, issues management and the general health of the MFI industry in the districts that are being surveyed.

So what next?

The success of the pilot has spurred Mobile Vaani to collaborate with Sa-Dhan on taking this service to more districts that have a high concentration of MFIs that are Sa-Dhan’s partners. Our plans are to go to Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh, although we are keen to work with Sa-Dhan partners from other states too, who may wish to roll out Punji ki Kunji in their priority areas. We will conduct workshops with MFI managers there and conduct community interactions required to encourage more and more people to call in on Punji ki Kunji. Supporting us will be Sa-Dhan’s team, organising orientation sessions in these states. We will also roll it out in Mobile Vaani local clubs and our Bihar and Madhya Pradesh services. We are currently promoting the service with MFIs working in these regions to encourage them to connect with their clients and gain insights for a mutually beneficial relationship.

Gram Vaani’s Mobile Vaani service has several years’ experience in communicating with people who live in media-dark areas, and gathering research, insights, grievances and requirements from these under-served communities. For more information about our research and data collection capabilities, visit here. Write to us at contact@gramvaani.org if you would like to know more.

A fire that has been brewing underground for a century has eventually led to drastic changes to the lives and livelihoods of tens of thousands of people in Jharkhand.

Coal mines under Dhanbad have been on fire for over a 100 years, and this has led to several changes such as the Dhanbad-Jharia rail line being routed out. The latest victim to the coal fire is the Dhanbad-Chandrapura rail line, which is the main corridor for passenger and freight trains on the East Central Railway (ECR).

Fires, first discovered in 1916, have been identified at several points under the Dhanbad-Chandrapura railway line, threatening to cave in at any point. Following much discussion around who was responsible for delayed action in dousing the fire, and the financial losses that would arise from stopping passenger and freight movement on the line, a report was commissioned by the Director General of Mine Safety, which recommended immediate closure of the railway line for the safety of people. The closure of the line was effected on June 15, 2017.

To understand people’s reactions to this sudden development, Jharkhand Mobile Vaani issued a call for opinions on the matter.

Of economic losses and hardships

Faisal from Ranchi was one of the few users who agreed that the closure of the Dhanbad-Chandrapura line was a good move for the benefit of the people, but he too highlighted that the government should immediately put in place measures to reduce difficulties that people are facing because of this.

Several users wondered how the government could have taken such a step before putting alternatives in place, such as Madan Lal Chauhan, who reports for Mobile Vaani from Baghmara, Dhanbad and Basal Sharma from Bermo, Bokaro especially when the fire has been burning for decades and such drastic closure of services would result in loss of crores of rupees for the government.

Birbal Mahto from Baghmara, Dhanbad talked about the urgency with which the government shut down the line, which, to him, puts its motives in question. He reports that the economic activity and livelihoods of traders who operate in the bazaar that is spread up to 15 kilometres from the railway line have been affected.

It’s not just economic activity that has been affected, however; students who used to use the railway line for cost-effective transportation between Dhanbad and Chandrapura now have to commute via buses and auto-rickshaws, increasing their expenditures considerably. This could have a serious impact on their education as most students from the region are already poor, going through their education with great financial difficulty.

Class 12 student Sushma Kumari from Petrawar, Bokaro mentioned the specific difficulties women face because of the line being closed – female students who travel from Dhanbad to Chandrapura to attend school might eventually drop out for lack of transportation, while women who have established livelihoods along the line will be left unemployed because they cannot access their workplace.

Is the government listening?

Needless to say, protests erupted following the announcement of the closure, including one by former Jharkhand chief minister Shri Babulal Marandi. Chief Minister Shri Raghubar Das has also met the central Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu to ask for alternative measures to be arranged at the earliest, since thousands were suffering because of the line being suspended.

Even as the ministry is considering the possibilities of rerouting trains and building alternate lines, and the Dhanbad district administration has arranged for buses through the route, many continue to protest against the move.

The issue continues to be debated at several levels; Rajya Sabha MP from Bihar Shri Harivansh, raised questions on the matter on 20 July, asking how the funds allotted to manage the fires were utilised, and what alternatives the government is considering given that the line was suspended on very short notice. Although Union Minister for Power, Coal, New & Renewable Energy and Mines Shri Piyush Goyal has responded saying that the fire under the Dhanbad-Chandrapura railway line was very close to the surface – which increases its dangers significantly – alternatives and solutions are yet to be formalised. And until then, the lives and livelihoods of thousands dependent on the railway line are in question.

Mobile Vaani seeks to collate opinions of people whose voices are often missed out – those in rural India. By providing opportunities for people to share views on issues that matter to their lives and livelihoods, Mobile Vaani is paving the way for hyperlocal news to travel beyond India’s heartlands, into the mainstream. Visit www.mobilevaani.in to know more and listen to news from India’s rural areas.

Namma Vaani is an IVR platform provided by Enable India. Run on Gram Vaani’s (OnionDev) Mobile Vaani platform, it caters to the information needs of persons with disabilities and has been piloted in Karnataka.

His exams only a few days away, Nagesh was in a quandary. As a visually impaired person, he needed a scribe to help him write his exams. Unable to find anyone in his community, Nagesh was relying on communicating his requirement through word of mouth and hoped he would find a scribe in time.

That’s when he heard of Namma Vaani, an IVRS platform on the Mobile Vaani system for persons with disabilities.

The Namma Vaani platform was initiated in March 2016 by Enable India, an organisation working to mainstream livelihood opportunities for persons with disability. Built in collaboration with Gram Vaani (OnionDev), Namma Vaani today receives over 400 calls everyday averaging 1 call every 2 minutes[1]. Nagesh used Namma Vaani, identified a scribe and was able to write his exams without any hindrances.

Social networking for persons with disabilities

Nearly 70 per cent of people with disabilities in India live in rural areas, with limited access to information related to disabilities or livelihood/education opportunities. Since many of them find it difficult to access public spaces they are unable to interact with others, share experiences or get information about relevant opportunities.

Namma Vaani is an audio-based social media platform to support the needs of persons with disabilities – to share stories, opportunities and ideas. The platform enables persons with disabilities to learn about job opportunities, engage with mobility-related topics or share experiences. It is also for NGOs, businesses and government organisations that wish to launch interventions for persons with disabilities, share job opportunities or increase awareness of their products. To ensure last-mile connectivity, Namma Vaani also works with government-appointed village rehabilitation workers spread across Karnataka.

Namma Vaani is a like a combination of Facebook and LinkedIn specially targeted at persons with disabilities who have access to a mobile phone but may not connected to the Internet. By leveraging the mobile phone revolution, Namma Vaani aims to reach the unreached corners of Karnataka and help persons with disabilities live a life of dignity.

Take the case of Jagadeesh, a visually impaired person from the Bijapur district of Karnataka. A regular Namma Vaani caller, Jagadeesh received information about possible vacancies in L&T through the discussion forum on Namma Vaani. He has since secured a job with L&T in Bengaluru.

Namma Vaani also encourages users to share their life experiences. This facilitates an attitudinal change in society. A recent example is the story of Rajkumar from Kalaburagi district, who took tips from the Self-Employment section on Namma Vaani to set up his own business for wedding photography. Stories such as these help challenge existing attitudes about disability and focus attention on the ability of the person to perform a certain task.

GRINS won a juror’s distinction in the 2009 Manthan Awards! Watch the entire team lined up for the award. The original source is here.

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
Gramin Radio Inter Networking System (GRINS) is an enhanced automation system for community radio stations. GRINS allows radio station operators to schedule broadcasts, preview programs, record live transmissions, and maintain an extensive semantically searchable library. GRINS does most processing in software to eliminate the need of buying expensive audio hardware. For this reason, GRINS can be run off commodity PCs and single board computers, significantly reducing the costs of setting up community radio stations. The GRINS software is easily accessible and freely available on the Gram Vaani website, it can be subsequently downloaded and installed on a computer.

JUROR’S EVALUATION
With the community radio taking off in India in a big way, Gramin Radio Inter Networking System (GRINS) software comes as boon to small time operators. The fact that it can run on any single PC or single board computer makes it doubly beneficial to community radio stations and significantly minimises the infrastructural costs. The system has been designed specifically keeping the rural environment in mind. The ease of its application ensures that more and more people will be able to take advantage of its technology making it a worthy nomination for the Manthan Awards.

Gram Vaani is among the 34 finalists from over 16,000 applicants to win a grant in the Economic Times Power of Ideas competition! The list of winners is here. This has been very useful to help us connect with investors interested in making an impact through technology.