Saturday, May 03, 2008

Drishtee : Opening doors in the hinterland

Spending his school vacation in the villages of Bihar’s Madhubani district made Drishtee Development & Communication Pvt Ltd’s MD & CEO, Satyan Mishra, aware of community life in a hamlet. The experience came to his aid later when he decided to become an entrepreneur.

Mishra feels that the hype around GDP growth has not touched village life at all. As lifting the standard of living in bucolic India remains a dream, the poor continue to migrate from villages to cities in search of a better life, without any guarantee of a turnaround in fortunes. This trend, Mishra feels, needs to be stalled and village communities need to be strengthened with business training and support. Enthused about his e-kiosk, Mishra, 34, says, “It is an eight-year-old company. We started the organisation three months before the ITC kiosks came into existence.” He adds, “The ITC chaupal and kiosk is more like backward integration. We have the second largest network after ITC with 4,000 entrepreneurs working with us. To set up an Internet kiosk, ITC spends Rs 1.8 lakh on a kiosk per year, and it owns and operates the kiosk.” But Drishtee has developed more of a franchisee model that is used to train and support villagers. There are roughly 1.5 million entrepreneurs who own shops in villages and earn from Rs 5,000-Rs 25,000 a month. They sell products through retail outlets.

To assist in operating a computer or an Internet kiosk, the company chooses graduates, including girls and students from the villagers, and teaches them emailing and surfing. Says Mishra, “We, currently have mobile phone kiosks in villages that are WAP-enabled and operate from a WAP platform. We operate from 12 states in the country, including five states in the Northeast—Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Manipur, Nagaland. We are also present in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and central and western Uttar Pradesh. Besides, we are in nine districts in Haryana and three districts each in Tamil Nadu and Orissa.” In these villages Drishtee operates out of an online and a GPRS and GSM mobile platform, and a GPRS browser.

In 2006, Dristhee was named the fastest developing hi-tech company in the country by Deloitte Consulting Ltd. The company operates mostly in villages having population less than 5,000. It was renamed as Dristhee Development and Communication Pvt Ltd in 2007.

Mishra has travelled a long way since he did his masters in international business from the Delhi School of Economics (1995-97). He has come up the hard way and graduated from Delhi University with BA Hons (History) in 1995. For his graduation, he was an apprentice in a stock-broking firm.

While studying for his masters, Mishra found that he had to be on the Internet and look at the rates of different commodities in different parts of India. This helped enlarge his knowledge base. Later, he joined a consulting firm in Bhopal called Yeti International Ltd and started doing evaluation projects for the government of Madhya Pradesh. Some of these projects were: Intergrated Rural Development Programme and the District Primary Education Programme. “Doing an MIB actually taught me the skills required to be an entrepreneur,” he says.

In March, 1998, he gave in to his entrepreneurial instincts and established Cyber Edge as a proprietorship company. It was an Internet training service centre. He rented 2,400 sq ft of space in Bhopal and started the training centre there. Sardar Machchi Singh, who was a friend of Mishra, was the tacit or sleeping partner of this venture. He debt-financed the company to the tune of Rs 1.68 lakh. “I had no money of my own, lost the money that I made from speculation. We trained almost 500 students in 2 years’ time. We began Cyber Edge with one computer and Rs 5,000 in Bhopal,” says Mishra. Incidently, Internet came to Bhopal in May 1998. Says Mishra, “In August 1998, we were seen as the largest Internet training centre after NIIT. In Bhopal, we began with 20 computers and 12 persons, and a 24-hour Internet cafĂ©.”

In 1998-99, Cyber Edge had a turnover of Rs 24 lakh and in 1999-2000, it had a turnover of Rs 39 lakh. “We gave the kiosk-training to a web-developer. In 2000-2001, we had a turnover of Rs 55 lakh and in 1999, April, we developed a website and we also had the largest portal development centre in Bhopal.”

In January 2000, Mishra got a call from the Madhya Pradesh government. It wanted to connect one of their district headquarters with the zilla panchayat and the gram panchayat through an intranet site, and the site was named Gyandoot. In December 2000, Mishra moved to Delhi. The same year, Cyber Edge was divided into Drishtee.com on August 8 and Cyber Infodiv. Pvt. Ltd (April 10). Drishtee.com is a public holding company and Mishra has two partners in the venture—Shailesh Thakur, a village entrepreneur and Nitin Guchhayat, an engineer and an MBA.

In 2003, a venture-capitalist Digital Partners, a Seattle-based company, invested Rs 70 lakh ($150,000) in Drishtee.com. Says Mishra, “Technology is easily accepted by villages and work gets carried out at 1/10th of the actual cost as it cuts down travel cost and bureaucratic delays. Internet connectivity helps people as they can a get certificate from the government, the elderly can also file for their pension without travelling to the district headquarters.”

Drishtee.com started with entrepreneurs in three Haryana villages in December 2000. “Between 2001-2002, we jumped from three to 42 kiosks in Haryana. It started with basics—providing certificates, community awareness, matrimonial services, employment— and 90% of our revenue was generated by the government,” he says.

In 2002-2003, the number of kiosks jumped from 42 to 95 and the company added districts from Bihar and UP. “The physical cost of getting the job done was reduced. At the district headquarters, our team collated the information and the concerned officer got the message in the inbox within 36 hours,” says Mishra, who involved three other partners in Drishtee.com. Eventually, to sustain revenue inflow, Drishtee added other services to its portfolio—computer education, photo studios and small diagnostic and healthcare centres in villages. The company also tied up with SBI and HDFC for micro-financing. The company employs 272 people. “We were too dependent on the government and we wanted to diversify,” says Mishra.

Between 2004-05, the number of e-kiosks shot up to 390, as the company also began expanding in the Northeast and the revenue for that year was Rs 1.8 crore. In 2005-06, the revenue for the company stood at Rs 3.6 crore and Deloitte Consulting called it the “fastest growing hi-tech company in the country”. In 2006-07, the number of kiosks shot up to 1,500 and the revenue to Rs 4.2 crore. The following fiscal, the revenue was Rs 7.5 crore. Mishra’s success mantra is: “The starting point of any venture should be what the customer needs.” He aims to reach out to over 10,000 villages in the next few years.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

The article Drishtee:Opening Doors in Hinterland was published in Financial Express by C. Jayanthi on May 2nd 2008.On may 3rd it appears in your website. Please look into the issue. I would like you to examine the posts for authentication before publishing them.