Dear Friends and Students
Yesterday Korea times published an interesting article on how China is struggling with Rural Brain Drain and how it is devising a big plan for Rural Brain Gain! After reading this article, I feel, a similar move is needed in the Indian context.
In fact, China did a similar call during the 1960s and 1970s. It is estimated that 16 million urban youth moved to the countryside for work and re-education. China has a 44% rural population but rural income per capita (2020) was only 39 % of urban. Now China is looking towards talent flow in the areas of smart agriculture, business operations, public service, etc esp. in the rural context. China is planning to revitalize its Universities to offer degrees in fulfilling this aspiration! The core technologies including 5G, the Internet of Things (IoT), and e-commerce are going to be integrated into its rural tech transformational program.
Alibaba & JD.com (e-commerce), XAG (agricultural drone manufacturer), Pinduoduo (online shopping platform), etc are working towards skill development and rural service centers for logistics capability. As of now, China has 13 million e-commerce merchants based in rural areas. They are expected to grow fast in the next few years.
Friends and Students,
While China is making this grand plan, we also need to start a similar initiative in India. Agro Brain Drain is a concern and affects our food security. Indian youth is about 41% of our population and rural youth are losing interest in agriculture. Only 20% of youth from rural families are engaged in agriculture! This is not a good sign (www.indiancooperative.com). In 2011, 70% of the Indian population lived in villages. In 2015, it got declined to 65%! In 4 years, there is a 5% drop!! What a sharp decline?
Covid-19 brought some reverse brain drain in tier-2 cities and villages. Thanks to internet broadband availability in rural India, this dream can be fulfilled. In fact, one of my friends, Biplab Saha, Founder at Uplist and eGramServe, an alumnus of IIT Delhi, established BPO and tech company in Narendra Nagar, Tehri Garhwal, Tehri District, Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. eGramServe fosters life-transforming careers for the local youth. It is working with a leading American retailer, a cutting-edge e-learning company, and the world’s largest legal content platform. They are helping in content enrichment, meta-tagging, translations, and building training data for fine-tuning their NLP & AI algorithms.
Similarly, I also need to mention Dr. Sridhar Mitta, The FIRST EMPLOYEE of Wipro Infotech Business (1980). I got a chance to meet Dr.Mitta in 2010 when I was moving out of Wipro. Dr. Mitta shared his vision of setting up a social enterprise. He started NextWealth Entrepreneurs Private Limited in the year 2009. As of today, in 2021, If I recollect his words, his vision came true!! NextWealth is a social impact organization providing world-class “customer interaction” and “data enrichment” services to its customers across AI/ML tech, E-commerce, FinTech, and other domains.
You know what, Dr. Mitta started delivery centers in the following locations: Salem (TN), Chittoor (AP), Hubli (KA), Bhilai(Chhattisgarh), Mysore (KA), and Vellore (TN)!! All these are tier 2 and 3 cities!! It has more than 2700 people working, out of which 65% are women. It has less than 10% annualized attrition. This company managed 251 million transactions to date in the last 10 years of its operation. It got a 72 Net Promoter Score, which is considered excellent (the percentage of customers rating their likelihood to recommend a company, a product, or a service to a friend or colleague). A score between 0 and 30 is a good, higher than 30 that would indicate that the company is doing great, An NPS over 70 means your customers are generating a lot of positive word-of-mouth from their referrals. NextWealth is at 72!! Now you can imagine its position!!!
We need to develop similar social enterprises across India, esp. organizations linked to the Agriculture domain & rural entrepreneurship. The next decade is highly critical in the Indian context as we are on the edge of losing our demographic dividend in the next 10 years. This decade has to leverage our demographic advantage!
Students passing out from 2021 to 2030 are the Game Changers!! Are You?
Your Well-wisher
Ravi Saripalle
Join Inspire to Innovate Storytelling Movement (i2itm.blogspot.com)
Source Inspiration:https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/world/2021/02/672_304587.html
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