Bizdewz

1) PreCool AC – Switch on your AC sending SMS

Waiting for 10 minutes to get the room cooled itself is a big inconvenience for many consumers in the severe Indian summer. Onida addressed this problem with its Precool AC that can be operated from anywhere by sending an SMS. So you can switch on your AC as you drive and get the room cooled before you reach the home.

2) Sparkle – Washing Machine with an in-built brush

Even with washing machines at home, people do wash clothes with hands using brush to remove the stains. Onida used this customer insight to innovate and introduced Sparkle range of washing machines with an in-built brush to give clean wash.

3) Scratch-proof DVD Player

Knowing that large number of Indians watch rented CDs/DVDs that will not be of high quality, Onida marketed its DVD player with inbuilt scratch guard feature as the one that can play any CD/DVDs with scratches on them.

4) Chef and Dietician Microwave Oven

Microwave ovens were not used to cook traditional Indian foods as people were not comfortable to do all the settings to do full fledged cooking. To address this concern, Onida introduced Microwave Ovens with more than 100 Indian auto cook touch menus including North Indian, South Indian, Bengali and many regional menus. This helps the North Indians to taste south Indian foods and the South Indians to cook North Indian food items with the touch of a button.

It also comes with Calorie-meter technology that displays the calorie count of the food being cooked satisfying the needs of the increasingly health conscious consumers.

Infrastructure in Urban India got uplifted through various Public Private Partnership programmes in building new airports, metro rail systems, bridges, expressways, water and power distribution projects and many more. However there hasn’t been any such transformational work in rural India by private enterprises. Ministry of Rural Development wants to change this with PURA 2.0.

PURA – Provision of Urban Amenities in Rural Areas is a Public Private Partnership (PPP) scheme that aims at rural infrastructure development with economic re-generation activities. PURA 2.0 is a revamped model of the earlier PURA scheme that went through pilot phase. Private partners selected to undertake PURA projects will identify a Gram Panchayat or a cluster of geographically contiguous Gram Panchayats for a population of about 25,000 – 40,000 to implement this scheme.

PURA is a Central sector scheme where Private partners would be required to provide amenities like water supply and sewerage, roads, drainage, solid waste management, street lighting and power distribution and undertake some economic and skill development activity as part of the project. In addition private developers can also provide additional revenue-earning facilities such as village linked tourism, integrated rural hub, rural market, agri-common services centre and warehousing etc that will provide livelihood opportunities to the rural population and help in reducing the urban migration.

PURA 2.0 has received good response from private developers and the Expression of Interest documents have been received from 99 companies. Government is going through the process to review and shortlist them now. Success of the PURA scheme lies not only in the rural infrastructure development but how well the private enterprises are able to generate revenue and provide livelihood opportunities to people in rural areas through their add-on projects. Such commercially viable and people centric projects will help in the sustained economic growth of rural India.

Will India Inc step up and deliver more than what is expected from the rural ministry and help bridge the rural – urban divide?