Reaching the Masses through a Rural Services Platform

Rural ICT initiatives undertaken so far have focused on device-level technologies that bring in a single service to the consumer. In this paper, we introduce the architecture and implementation of a Rural Services Platform which is not only a low cost shared model, but also brings in innovation in an end-to-end solution while touching the next billion population. The richness of interaction technologies used by a consumer or moderated by a facilitator for the consumer plays an important role in adoption of financial, advisory and business services by a rural populace. We describe our work in the context of social transfers by Government of India like NREGA payments and also present the architecture of a solution which can be used by 1) Business Correspondents who go into the remote villages to disburse payments 2) consumers directly, who can through a voice channel conduct their transactions of money transfers. Our solution can be used to provide an array of services across industries like banking, finance, agriculture, health-care and education to the end user, thereby not only reducing the cost of delivery, but also making the entire innovation scalable.