The entrepreneur bug seems to have bitten too many young Indians of late! We've been seeing entrepreneurship camps, been hearing about seeding (that was a pure biological term in the 90s) and angels (and this was reserved to the Bible) and have been having our own share of college dropouts idolising Bill Gates! For someone who truly believes in the power of potential and will, it's just amazing to see this enormous rush of energy and I am convinced that some of these ventures will take India from being a pure service oriented market to a product oriented one.
It is in this context that I want to write about Flipkart.com. It is an online book store, modeled in the same lines as of Amazon started by two IIT Delhi grads. There isn't anything spectacular about Flipkart, because they are just following the lines of a model started off by Jeff Bezos 15 years ago. But somehow I like Flipkart (as they say it all lies in winning the heart of the customer!) for it's simplicity, for the fact that it's founded by two young Indian lads, for it's excellent share of rare books, for it's excellent price mechanism where the same title is offered at varying prices based on the print, publisher etc, for it's extremely search engine friendly design, for it's easy and flexible payment options, for it's very prompt delivery and excellent packing (the books I ordered came bubbled wrapped and in a cardboard box) and for it's decent customer service (when they could not procure a book I ordered from any of their vendors, they gave me a discount coupon on future purchages and I just got an alert from them saying that a book that I said I was interested in was available with them now). The site has a user friendly design with common features like comments and related books, but considering the fact that they are still growing, these features are not very mature and useful. But overall I will recommend this site for others within India to shop for books - because it does a decent job of delivering books on time, has a solid collection of books and because it's a startup right here at Koramangla, Bangalore!
Pure book portals are a relatively new concept in India and it's an area with huge potential. It is pretty disappointing though that almost all the players are sticking onto the tried and tested ways of retail or online book selling and have not ventured out to try out new avenues. Typically most Indians are not tuned to buying books and most books sold at these outlets are prohibitively expensive for the common man (mango people according to Imtiaz Ali - watch this) - because of this business model most major players are restricted to a very small pie of urban corporate class. There lies a sea of opportunity for these players to reach out to the average Indian - through regional language books, second hand books and networking the many local run libraries in the thousands of small towns and villages of the country.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Branded Puja Kits! What an Idea Sir ji
This idea just blew me away the first time I read about it. Here is a 27 year old who has tapped into may be a true sacred cash 'cow'! Sacred Moments is a startup by Prakash Mundra which provides packaged puja kits which he claims includes all items required to conduct a puja by even a newbie. As per the company's website, the kit for Diwali puja contains around 30 items including Laxmi Ganesha murthy, crafted coconut, ghee, cotton wick, honey, pooja book and even gangajal. I am not sure if there is a number on the worth of the spiritual market of India, but in a society where religion and rituals hold central sway and where a number of people are ignorant about the requisites of a Puja and where to procure the items from, this wonderful idea of Prakash is bound to be a runaway success.
Floating Retail Ideas in the backwaters of Kerala
Nostalgia is the word as I write this piece. My mind meanders to the paddy fields of Neerettupuram, to the narrow kutcha roads where only cycles plied, to our tharavadu on the banks of the Pamba river and to my paternal grandparents (who are no more with us) with whom I spent most of my summer holidays as a kid. The world knows this place (Kuttanad) better as the backwaters of Kerala. More than it's importance as a tourist destination, the intricate system of canals and backwaters in Kerala connect hundreds of villages and is the lifeline of over a million people. Thousands of people commute to work everyday on boats, even today you can't miss seeing farmers transporting their produce to the market on their vallams (Malayalam for boat), political parties use the waterways for campaigns and it is the primary source of irrigation for the predominantly agricultural area.
Was it then surprising that the Kerala State Co-operative Consumers Federation decided to tap into the potential of these internal waterways and take their retail stores to the boat jetties of Kuttanad? The federation has launches catchy bright red and white supermarket boats christened as floating triveni in June 2009. Catch a video on the floating supermarket below:
This is a true bottom of the pyramid venture and is bound to be a roaring success. Most parts of Kuttanad is predominantly rural and has an agrarian population, typically there will be a single town catering to the consumption needs of a number of satellite villages and the villages themselves will have just a few small shops catering to the ration needs of the villagers. Floating Triveni addresses this glaring need of the BOP customer perfectly - here is a product that caters to all your shopping needs, comes to your doorstep and is priced significantly lower than other stores. It's one of those ideas which you look at and say, 'it was so obvious and why didn't anybody think about it before?' - that's the halmark of all simple ideas. A number of FMCGs in India have given lot of thought of the content, packaging and pricing of their products to suite the BOP Indian customer, but very few innovative ideas have sprung up on reaching out to the Indian consumer (we get fixated by the inflated numbers of the great Indian middle class (courtesy Pavan Varma!) that we tend to forget about the billion strong BOP customers of the country!). I can imagine other hard goods jumping into the bandwagon (boat?) soon - like agricultural equipments and fertilisers, but for sure the people of Kuttanad will be thanking the Government for the red and white floating supermarkets now and it will be really interesting to see the numbers of Consumer Fed next quarter as well as the potential clones!!
Was it then surprising that the Kerala State Co-operative Consumers Federation decided to tap into the potential of these internal waterways and take their retail stores to the boat jetties of Kuttanad? The federation has launches catchy bright red and white supermarket boats christened as floating triveni in June 2009. Catch a video on the floating supermarket below:
This is a true bottom of the pyramid venture and is bound to be a roaring success. Most parts of Kuttanad is predominantly rural and has an agrarian population, typically there will be a single town catering to the consumption needs of a number of satellite villages and the villages themselves will have just a few small shops catering to the ration needs of the villagers. Floating Triveni addresses this glaring need of the BOP customer perfectly - here is a product that caters to all your shopping needs, comes to your doorstep and is priced significantly lower than other stores. It's one of those ideas which you look at and say, 'it was so obvious and why didn't anybody think about it before?' - that's the halmark of all simple ideas. A number of FMCGs in India have given lot of thought of the content, packaging and pricing of their products to suite the BOP Indian customer, but very few innovative ideas have sprung up on reaching out to the Indian consumer (we get fixated by the inflated numbers of the great Indian middle class (courtesy Pavan Varma!) that we tend to forget about the billion strong BOP customers of the country!). I can imagine other hard goods jumping into the bandwagon (boat?) soon - like agricultural equipments and fertilisers, but for sure the people of Kuttanad will be thanking the Government for the red and white floating supermarkets now and it will be really interesting to see the numbers of Consumer Fed next quarter as well as the potential clones!!
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Why History is boring....
I am disappointed that I was never taught about the history of my own state in school. Blame it on a national syllabus or the bias of the historians - which ever might come out true, I've been the loser! There is a negative societal bias towards history as an academic subject in our country - I wouldn't be wrong to say that not many people make a conscious choice to study history, afterall it's portrayed as boring, unintelligent and insipid. Well, blame it on the methods of teaching and the syllabus and not on the subject alone. We have never been taught the 'why' of history - why do you need to know (I would prefer to use the word 'know' in place of 'learn') 'your' history, we have never been taught to ask any questions about history and most often the history we learn has been disconnected from our immediate surrounding. All of us have a strong innate urge to question, explore and decipher the world around us. That is what makes the study of science and mathematics so fascinating for many. Whatever we study in science helps us directly in understanding the intricacies of the things (natural and synthetic) we see around and equips us with skills to explore and deconstruct them further. This builds an endless fascination of discovery. This is where I believe the teaching of history fails. The study of history is nothing but a journey into deciphering the past, a study of our social, political and economic evolution and fundamental in helping us answer the question of why are we who we are today. Fundamentally, doesn't the social and economic dynamics of our society influence our existence more than any other scientific phenomenon (other than may be biology and medicine)? It is a huge mistake to classify history in a silo and treat it as a separate subject. History can never be understood in it's entirety unless and until we under a host of other subjects like anthropology, archeology, sociology, art symbolism, geography, economics and politics - history is what you get when all these and more amalgamate, it distills into a story of evolution and paves the path to the present. It's a pity that history is not given it's due importance in our country, it's saddening that we are not taught to have an inquisitive mind about our past, to fathom into the times that shaped our today and the men from whom we have been made....May be that's the difference between learning and knowing....
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Why scrapping board exams won't work in India
It does look as if the UPA Cabinet is running on steroids - each minister is trying to outsmart the other with radical policy announcements and raking in a national debate every other day. Perhaps the most significant of the proposals has been the suggestion to make class 10 and 12 exams optional. It's a welcome change to have someone like Kapil Sibal heading the Human Resources Development ministry and a number of Mr. Sibal's policy statements are sure to bring in sweeping changes to the educational structure of the country. Though the intention to make the board exams optional is laudatory, I am convinced that it will not serve the purpose of reducing stress on students and parents and more importantly will not radically change the educational system of the country. Below is an interview of Mr. Sibal on the same topic by Barkha Dutt:
Here is why I think Mr. Sibal's well intented and ambitious idea will not work:
> Stress to the students and parents is not caused by the examinations per se. Examinations are just a vehicle that externalises the deeply embedded culture of social expectations and a uni-dimensional system of measuring the capability and worth of an individual.
> In the Indian social context - 'success', 'accomplishment', 'achievement' and to a large degreee the 'perceived social worth' of a student is primarily measured by the single factor of marks. As these social perceptions greatly affect the morale and esteem of an individual, the inner need to score high on the single parameter (marks) that defines these perceptions will naturally be very high.
> As George Orwell said "All animals are born equal. Some are more equal than others". I do not think that every individual is endowed with the same cerebral abilities and there will surely be people strewn all over the scale of measurement from top to bottom. This is not going to be altered by making the board examinations optional and surely this will come to glaring light for the single national examination that Mr. Sibal is proposing. So in effect, all that Mr. Sibal's proposal will do is to transfer the stress and trauma from the board examinations to the single national examination that he is mooting. We need to tweak our social perception to accept the fact that people will be differently endowed and not to treat failing in an examination as a social stigma.
> My basic argument is that what we need is a multi-dimensional scale of measuring the performance of a student. Currently, the socially and academically accepted parameter for success and achievement is solely marks - which puts extreme pressure on students to do well only on this single measure. But, if the society and more importantly colleges change the measurement of success and accomplishment to a broader array of parameters, the importance on examinations will naturally die away. For example, if colleges and society measured success solely on the dancing ability of students and if admissions were based solely (this word is emphasised because that is what we do right now, base admissions solely on the basis of marks and it does sound ridiculous with this example isnt it?) on how well they did on a national dancing examination(!), who would ever care how well a student did in science or mathematics or history? Parents would be spending a fortune on getting dance tuitions and the same stress and trauma would be present days before the dance examination. Every society has certain parameters for the measurement of social perceptions like success and altering these parameters will alter the way these perceptions are measured.
> The bane of our educational system is this uni-dimensional measurement of the accomplishment of a student. This kills all initiative and efforts to build a more balanced learning experience, because what is rewarded is non-creative linear learning. For example, even the premier colleges of India will give admission to a person who has scored 97% in his board exams, over a person who has scored 90% but has an excellent track record of extra-curricular achievements - on what basis do you say that the former student is more qualified than the latter to study in the institute? Marks are rarely a fore-bearer of success in life and it's high time we shed this uni-dimensional focus on a single parameter of measuring achievement and success.
> Mr. Sibal would do well to introduce a more balanced system of measuring the success and achievement of a student - by considering the quality of extra curricular activities, participation in inter-school competitions, depth of creative expression of the student, organisational abilities displayed, social service, evidence of research, letters of recommendation etc. This will surely revolutionise the way achievement and success is perceived in our society and surely lessen the importance and stress created by examinations.
> I will also appeal to Mr. Sibal to make teaching an attractive career option (or even a compulsory one for students from premier government colleges in line with the policy for MBBS students having to serve a rural term). It is my firm belief that the reason for the dwindling quality of education in the country is primarily due to the lack of creative and inspirational teachers at the school and most importantly at the college level. We have all grown up listening to the wonderful Indian tradition of a guru-shishya relationship, where the guru was seen next to God. This respect to the guru was not born out of him being in that position, but due to the immense knowledge, humility and concern the Guru possessed. Unfortunately, with teaching being seen as the last resort of an unemployed man and being 'branded' as an un-exciting, monotonous and stagnant profession - creative, inspirational and committed teachers are a rarity in this country. Without a change to the quality of teaching in the country, any radical policy announcement by the respected Union HRD minister will fail to reach the last thatched government school in one of the thousands of villages in the country.
P.S.: I wonder sometimes why governments do not take a systemic view and address the actual problem rather than trying to roll out piecemeal solutions that just dress the wound. Stories like that of Dr. Abraham George and of the Super 30 IIT training institute in Patna clearly show that what we desperately need is an upliftment in the quality of education through better teachers, better access to schools and a more balanced measurement of the success, accomplishments and abilities of students.
Here is why I think Mr. Sibal's well intented and ambitious idea will not work:
> Stress to the students and parents is not caused by the examinations per se. Examinations are just a vehicle that externalises the deeply embedded culture of social expectations and a uni-dimensional system of measuring the capability and worth of an individual.
> In the Indian social context - 'success', 'accomplishment', 'achievement' and to a large degreee the 'perceived social worth' of a student is primarily measured by the single factor of marks. As these social perceptions greatly affect the morale and esteem of an individual, the inner need to score high on the single parameter (marks) that defines these perceptions will naturally be very high.
> As George Orwell said "All animals are born equal. Some are more equal than others". I do not think that every individual is endowed with the same cerebral abilities and there will surely be people strewn all over the scale of measurement from top to bottom. This is not going to be altered by making the board examinations optional and surely this will come to glaring light for the single national examination that Mr. Sibal is proposing. So in effect, all that Mr. Sibal's proposal will do is to transfer the stress and trauma from the board examinations to the single national examination that he is mooting. We need to tweak our social perception to accept the fact that people will be differently endowed and not to treat failing in an examination as a social stigma.
> My basic argument is that what we need is a multi-dimensional scale of measuring the performance of a student. Currently, the socially and academically accepted parameter for success and achievement is solely marks - which puts extreme pressure on students to do well only on this single measure. But, if the society and more importantly colleges change the measurement of success and accomplishment to a broader array of parameters, the importance on examinations will naturally die away. For example, if colleges and society measured success solely on the dancing ability of students and if admissions were based solely (this word is emphasised because that is what we do right now, base admissions solely on the basis of marks and it does sound ridiculous with this example isnt it?) on how well they did on a national dancing examination(!), who would ever care how well a student did in science or mathematics or history? Parents would be spending a fortune on getting dance tuitions and the same stress and trauma would be present days before the dance examination. Every society has certain parameters for the measurement of social perceptions like success and altering these parameters will alter the way these perceptions are measured.
> The bane of our educational system is this uni-dimensional measurement of the accomplishment of a student. This kills all initiative and efforts to build a more balanced learning experience, because what is rewarded is non-creative linear learning. For example, even the premier colleges of India will give admission to a person who has scored 97% in his board exams, over a person who has scored 90% but has an excellent track record of extra-curricular achievements - on what basis do you say that the former student is more qualified than the latter to study in the institute? Marks are rarely a fore-bearer of success in life and it's high time we shed this uni-dimensional focus on a single parameter of measuring achievement and success.
> Mr. Sibal would do well to introduce a more balanced system of measuring the success and achievement of a student - by considering the quality of extra curricular activities, participation in inter-school competitions, depth of creative expression of the student, organisational abilities displayed, social service, evidence of research, letters of recommendation etc. This will surely revolutionise the way achievement and success is perceived in our society and surely lessen the importance and stress created by examinations.
> I will also appeal to Mr. Sibal to make teaching an attractive career option (or even a compulsory one for students from premier government colleges in line with the policy for MBBS students having to serve a rural term). It is my firm belief that the reason for the dwindling quality of education in the country is primarily due to the lack of creative and inspirational teachers at the school and most importantly at the college level. We have all grown up listening to the wonderful Indian tradition of a guru-shishya relationship, where the guru was seen next to God. This respect to the guru was not born out of him being in that position, but due to the immense knowledge, humility and concern the Guru possessed. Unfortunately, with teaching being seen as the last resort of an unemployed man and being 'branded' as an un-exciting, monotonous and stagnant profession - creative, inspirational and committed teachers are a rarity in this country. Without a change to the quality of teaching in the country, any radical policy announcement by the respected Union HRD minister will fail to reach the last thatched government school in one of the thousands of villages in the country.
P.S.: I wonder sometimes why governments do not take a systemic view and address the actual problem rather than trying to roll out piecemeal solutions that just dress the wound. Stories like that of Dr. Abraham George and of the Super 30 IIT training institute in Patna clearly show that what we desperately need is an upliftment in the quality of education through better teachers, better access to schools and a more balanced measurement of the success, accomplishments and abilities of students.
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