Empowering rural communities to build profitable

rural economic activities

About Us

Rural Caravan is a design vehicle for mainly rural and broadly

social development. We understand people and communities

through their aspirations, desires and constraints, and provide

opportunities for fulfilling not only their economic needs but

also societal and self-actuation needs.

We have observed that rural societies have richness in

traditional knowledge, a distinct culture of humility and a

variety in offerings in talent, products and services. Urban

societies on the other hand are tech savvy and have skill sets

to market and brand. We imagine a world of inter-

connectedness between these two cultures through

community creation for a higher purpose and healthy living.

We create profitable rural enterprises through a culture of co-

creation and engaging even the urban dwellers in the process

and facilitate human development at the grass roots level

through meaningful engagement of rural and urban societies.

We create opportunities for the people at their doorsteps

which will help reduce migration and poor-quality jobs. We

want the urban societies to learn from the rural counterparts

on being simple and healthy with strong community ethics

(caring about human and animal life). We want to create a

barrier free society that can collaborate irrespective of rich-

poor, urban-rural and caste-gender differences to alleviate

each other towards a higher purpose of living as human

beings. This is our dream!

Designing for Aspirations!

INTRODUCTION

Everyone needs a great design. Just because a product is

being designed for a social cause doesn’t make it a great

product. Design is a term that usually gets symbolized in the

mind as aesthetically appealing creations even if it is for the

poor. Yet rural design is treated markedly different from urban

design approach for a variety of reasons. Designing for the

rural community typically looks at only the functionality of the

product or service excluding the people. The poor are

accidentally seen as helpless people that need to be saved

who have no agency. This type of design strips humans of their

dignity. The typical lens of looking at rural design problems is

through the framework of “needs”. Typically, the physiological

needs which form the base of Maslow’s hierarchy are itself

never saturated in the villages and so great emphasis has

been laid over to promote such products which reflect basic

necessities of human life. The question that lingers to the

mind, is the design process so simple and straightforward?

It is time to look beyond Maslow’s basic physiological needs.

Desires, dreams and aspirations have to be brought into

picture to drive human development. Urban counterparts

enjoy a high level of customization in products and services

across sectors. At the tip of the internet, information is at least

available through which decision can be made. Quite

contradictory, rural folks have to be content with only generic

design features. Even rural livelihood options are designed

usually based on the strengths of the organizations working

with them rather on the aspirations of the beneficiary. The

ideal solution would be to embrace constraints of the

developing world and merge it with the typical desires of the

first world.

Aspirations over Needs!

FOUNDING TEAM

Manish Nair, 29 Manish has been a Marketing and Sales professional throughout his industry

career of over 5+ years supporting manufacturing and consulting organisations.

Graduated as a Mechanical engineer from Pune university, Manish also pursued

his Masters in Business Administration specialising in Marketing from Great Lakes

Institute of Management, Chennai

For Rural Caravan, Manish takes care of Marketing and Urban Collaborations

Rohit Pillai, 29 Rohit graduated as a Materials engineer from NIT-Trichy. He further worked in the

manufacturing sector for over 2 years before pursuing his interest in research and

joining as a Research Assistant in IISc Bangalore. After over 3 years in research,

Rohit went on to pursue his M-Tech in Technology and Development from IIT-

Bombay.

For Rural Caravan, Rohit is the Chief Strategist and Head of Product Design.

Liju George, 29 Liju is a Process Standardisation expert having worked in the manufacturing sector

in India and Germany. He completed his graduation from NIT-Trichy in Metallurgy

and further his MS from TU-Berlin. His interest in the social sector motivated him

to be an SBI Youth for India fellow

For Rural Caravan, Liju focuses on Training and Development.

Nikesh Ingle, 30 Nikesh is an electrical engineer with work experience in Brihanmumbai Municipal

Corporation. After completing his M-Tech in Technology and Development from IIT-

Bombay, Nikesh also worked as a fellow for Ministry of Rural Development, India.

Hailing from a rural background he understands the on-field dynamics and

challenges in rural areas.

For Rural Caravan, Nikesh focusses on Field Operations.

The Story So far!

Failure and Learning With motive of creating economic activities in rural areas, Rural Caravan

started its first intervention in Palsunde village in Palghar, Maharashtra.

Even after spending more than 8 months with the community and forming

a team, the intervention failed. The political dynamics in a large diverse

community are too big a hurdle for a collective economic development.

But we did part ways on good terms. Giving us insights on the

characteristics of a community that should be chosen for an economic

intervention. One of our connects from Palsunde then introduced us to

Amale, a tribal hamlet with natural beauty beyond words, far from

development but open to change.

Amale was a very small village with close to 70 households and a

population of 250 people. With no electricity, no mobile connectivity and

poverty, this community was far from development, yet led a peaceful life

amidst the lap of nature.

TOURISM FOR RURAL URBAN ENGAGEMENT

We started understanding the community better with an idea of exploring tourism at the back of our heads. To our surprise and delight, we were glad to identify that the people of Amale took pride in the beauty of the village and wanted to share it with others. Rural Caravan started the work on developing a tourism enterprise in the village through necessary hospitality related capacity building from welcoming the guests till bidding them goodbye. The village group also built minor necessary infrastructure like shed and toilets for the visitors.

We conducted several pilot trips with all male, all female, kids and mixed groups. This built their capacity to plan and execute trips of any demography.

With continuous capacity building over the months and purposeful urban collaboration, today, the tourism enterprise of Mahalakshmi Self Help Group, Amale hosts the training programs of a Mumbai based organisation as a location partner. An urban organisation collaborating for building a rural enterprise.

While building the tourism intervention, we realised that it cannot be an enterprise for continuous income as the long dry summers made the business seasonal. We interacted further with the community to identify other possible entrepreneurial intervention.

IMPROVED ‘CHULHAS’ & ENTREPRENEURSHIP

The cooking in households of the village was completely dependent on traditional rural cookstoves called chulhas. One of the leading contributors of indoor air pollution in India. We created awareness and conducted health check up to sensitize the women on the problem they are facing. We shared with them different types of existing improved cooks-stoves and Astra-ole, IISc Bangalore design was their choice to proceed. But the characteristic of the product that led into the community was the prevention of the blackening of their houses, and not indoor air pollution and women health. An anecdotal realization about aspirations.

Moreover, an urban aspiration to support a rural community was displayed by Dr Pramod Khadilkar from IISc Bangalore an expert in Astra-ole cookstove, who participated in co-creating an improved cook-stove manufacturing enterprise in Amale. Dr Pramod travelled to Amale and trained the community in constructing the chulhas by making a few with them. Additionally, the team was also guided in to benchmark earlier and new cook-stove to identify and experience benefits. It helped them market the product better as sellers.

The cook-stove enterprise of Mahalakshmi self-help group made Amale village Indoor Air Pollution free in April 2017. They are deploying cooks-stoves in villages in the region for an average INR 2000 a unit.

HONEY &

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Wild honey rearing is widely practiced in the

region. Few households were also equipped

with Honey collection boxes but not being

used to its full potential. We exposed the

village team to the importance of packaging

honey by connecting them to urban markets

and showing how the prices vary. But the

team was more shocked with the jaggery and

sugar-based adulteration in the regular

market products and wanted consumers to

have access to the pure wild honey they

collect from the forest, unprocessed and

unadulterated.

We provided them with the support to

package their honey in 100ml glass bottles

with proper branding through stickers. An

opportunity opened to test the urban market

acceptance to this product in form of an

exhibition organised by a social club based

out of Nasik. At the exhibition, honey was on

high demand.

During the trips in the village, honey is also

sold to the visitors at stalls set to display rural

products. The team has been repeatedly

receiving orders from existing users and are

now building this enterprise under the

leadership of women in the group.

URBAN COLLABORATIONS

The success of every enterprise at Amale needs to be

dedicated to the active urban participation. We have

witnessed immense support from urban socially inclined

individuals and organisations in nurturing the communities

and providing them a sustained income.

An IISc Bangalore expert training the team on manufacturing

improved cookstoves, a visitor helping in urban partnerships,

a group of students taking the team to pitch for CSR project,

were few urban aspirations fulfilled while collaborating to build

rural enterprises.

The description of rural ecosystem as an agriculture

dependent, under-developed and poverty struck society has

created a myopia around their needs amongst the urban

community, leading several development interventions to

failure. For this to change it is important that the real rural

society is introduced to its urban counterpart on a platform

that provides an opportunity to learn, engage and interact, to

all its stakeholders.

The core of our work will essentially focus on creating

communities and collaborations irrespective of rural-urban

gap based on human desire for progeny (translates to standing

out and being appreciated), power (influence and possession)

and purpose (mission oriented).

CSR for REAL

One of our initiatives to collaborate

CSR initiatives with rural economic

activities is through Rural Economic

Activity Launchpad (REAL).

The rural economic activities in its

journey requires seed investment for

its operations. The investments are

predominantly required for initial

inventory, marketing and community

mobilisation. Through REAL we

provide an opportunity for CSR to

integrate themselves in rural

enterprise development for a larger

impact via economic development of

the target community.

The economic activities like improved

cook-stove dissemination also helps

to achieve dual impact through

economic development of one

community and drudgery reduction

for another.

We also consult organisation with

impact assessment of their

investment.

VILLAGE ENTERPRISE DEVELOPMENT

BENEFICIARY CATEGORIZATION

Amale has been our pilot enterprise where we tested our expertise in working with the community

to build economic activities. Understanding the time and effort required to do the same, Rural

Caravan may not be able to do it with every community on the platform.

All communities joining the platform will be eligible to collaborate, learn and access the offerings

& tools for a price. However only a chosen few will be nurtured the way Amale is being done.

When every community on the platform is supported to scale their economic activity, the chosen

few will be nurtured to be an INR 1 Bn rural enterprise.

Empowerment Focussed Offerings Empowerment Focused Tools

The rural enterprises on the platform will be

able to access support from Rural Caravan

and other organisations & individuals on

the platform in the areas mentioned

herewith.

The areas identified are based on

interactions with several communities and

partnering organisations to understand the

challenges faced by the rural economic

activities to scale

The communities on the platform need to

be assessed in order to help them scale

and identify more opportunities suiting to

the strength of the ecosystem.

The tools help us to understand the

community better and nurture them further

to spin off multiple economic activities

suiting to the resources, skills, knowledge

and culture of the community.

This will help us design interventions that

are not forced on the community but

adopted as a choice.

The Big Dream

Rural Caravan strives to be the next revolution by being a bridge between rural India and the

globe. We want our customers to experience satisfaction beyond just the dopamine effect on

social media. Through our platform, we would like to achieve the following goals:

• Bring rural communities delivering a product or a service onto the platform to nurture

them in innovation, customer interaction and wowing. Brand their stories and preserve

their processes in traditional knowledge. Understand their aspirations and spread their

desire out to the universe to help them connect with suitable customers, mentors and

other businesses.

• Provide a space for expression of talent and skills of rural people that can be appreciated

by the rest of the world and help them connect with apt opportunities. Minds on the

margins are not marginal minds.

• Bring the village and panchayat at the mainstream through storytelling. Let their voices

be heard so that their needs are put out unadulterated and solutions can be devised

through a participatory approach willingly by the community and organizations interested

in community development (academia, foundations and CSR).

• Provide opportunities for purposeful engagement of rural and urban sensitized youths to

find a meaning for living by making a difference in the community.