THE RURAL WAY
Job Creation | HarVa
The Desi Advantage By Jen Swanson Ajay Chaturvedi, founder and CEO of HarVa, is amazed that others can’t see what he does—incredible business opportunity in villages across India. According to this banker-turned-entrepreneur, these untapped villages can also be the key to helping India regain its footing in a sector of the economy that helped create many jobs—BPOs. The global BPO market—valued at $120150 billion—is said to grow 15 per cent per year. Yet, over the past few years, competitors from China and Philippines have threatened to topple India’s position as the world’s premium provider of low cost BPO services. Although, according to Nasscom, India grew its market share within the global industry from 51 per cent in 2009 to 58 per cent in 2011, and accounts for nearly 7.5 per cent of the GDP, several western clients who predominantly farmed out work to India are now being forced to take their work elsewhere as input costs rise dramatically here. “Most people haven’t cracked through tier II cities,” Chaturvedi says of the foreign clients 3 6 | INC. | JULY 2012
who find outsourcing to urban India too expensive, and the recruiters who only consider tier I and tier II cities when staffing their firms. “If we don’t look at rural India soon,” he warns, “we may lose our competitive advantage.” The business sweet spot lies here, he says. Which is why HarVa, (derived from the Hindi word for green that signifies prosperity), and short for “harvesting value” sources talent from the villages—where, according to Chaturvedi, there are nearly 130 million rural skilled workers who are unemployed due to lack of opportunity. All successful businesses segment customers. Chaturvedi has done those studies on his employees instead. His initial pilots in Teekli, a village off Gurgaon’s Sohna road, showed the really untapped demography were rural women. “They wouldn’t jump jobs, are truly appreciative of a chance to work, and are committed.” So, since launching in early 2010, HarVa has built up a 300-odd all-women team for its
four rural centres in Haryana, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh. In these centres, women who are trained for free by HarVa, work on mostly non-voice outsourcing projects for a clutch of international clients. Each one of them earns between `4,000-`7,000. Before you can even congratulate his do-good women champion’s role, Chaturvedi makes it apparent he steers clear of politically charged descriptives such as women’s empowerment. “We hire them because they’re smart, efficient and capable.” Chaturvedi, a BITS Pilani alumnus, and an MBA from Wharton School of Business, is confident of healthy growth despite the