Bussiness Ideas

Zrima Edutech Pvt Ltd is a rural & II & III tier City BPO, Back Office Support, Digital Marketing & Software/Apps development sector Start-up, incubated in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh. There are three dots on the board – rural, technology and for-profit. With the intention to bring new India’s flagship industry – IT Enabled Services to where India really resides – Rural areas & Small cities. Zrima was Conceived Our philosophy envisions a win-win situation between urban clients and the rural work force of India. Harnessing the power of Information Technology, supported by our strong desire to make a difference, we create robust operational setups (delivery centers) in rural, II & III tier cities. Opportunities we envision with We feel that the rapidly growing outsourcing sector can be one of the solutions to eradicate the troubles faced by the employable rural workforce. It also solves One of the key issues that India is wrestling with is how to preserve the country’s integral outsourcing industry, which remained largely entrenched in the major metro areas: Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, and Kolkata. As the urban cost structure is rising in all dimensions from real estate to wages, competition for talent is severe, and attrition rates are high. The workforce is highly unstable. Rural and small-town India, in contrast, seemed attractive both cost-wise and culturally, offering more loyalty and stability, as well as better return on investment for quality training. In the face of rising costs and complexity, everyone agreed that rural and small-town BPO & Back Office Support Centres are an essential strategy for maintaining the labour arbitrage advantage. Another opportunity we zeroed in on is not on the Indian side, but the U.S.A. While the Indian BPO industry Is primarily servicing larger companies in the US, another 50 lakhs small businesses with significant outsourcing potential dotted the landscape. Even if such businesses only outsourced a modest $5,000 per year, this segment would top $25 billion. We took gradual risks in selecting our locations and did not go straight to a remote rural destination. Our first major back-office operation is in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh. It has a large population and no other BPO employer, making it easy to recruit and retain talent. At the same time, it is very much connected through New Delhi, Mumbai, Haydrabad, Kolkata with daily flights, a rising city in terms of Infra & Manpower, which gave us access to experienced management talent. Slowly, we building successful operations in Kushinagar (which has now an International Airport), Ayodhaya, Allahabad, Ballia & Varanasi –all II & III Tier towns in Uttar Pradesh. We are going to start 10 of the small-town operations as hubs to create rural centers. Each small-town center is going to manage 10 rural centers of 100 people each. none of these towns supplied any trained management talent either. To overcome this, we recruited designated general managers from each location and trained them extensively at the Gorakhpur operation. Then, embellished with a tray of perks, we moved them back to their hometowns. We follow a distributed operations model, whereby the Gorakhpur office acts as the interface between the client and the rural centres. By working out of tier II & III towns and villages, the overheads are lower, which is passed on to the client in form of lower costs. While the villages gain from the employment opportunities and the infrastructure, the client gets a cost advantage of up to 40% of their current costs. Challenges We are Facing We are perfectly aware of the challenges of bringing up these rural centres. English is not widely spoken, infrastructure is even weaker, office buildings are of inadequate quality, and broadband is unreliable. But the low real estate cost and various other advantages will compensate for these drawbacks. As we observed Rural, II & III tier city Manpower lacked in terms of language or computer skills, but they more than compensated for in work ethic, commitment, and desire to learn. Since Our philosophy has always been, “Hire for attitude, train for skill,” We know from the get-go that training is something we would invest heavily in. We have created a PR campaign focusing on the lifestyles of our rural and small-town employees to attract trained managers away from big cities and Willing to return to their homeland. At Beginning We trained all freshers with computer operations, basic office management, HR practices, data entry and Internet usage. We face a lot of trial and error learning’s, which is also helping us shape our system. Our Approach & Model The new model is to have distributed centres with 50–75 seats in multiple rural & II, III city locations and a workflow management capability that will be centrally administered managing available resources at potentially hundreds of locations with skill-based routing and decentralised skill development. The good thing is that the government has already done the basic ground work. We now have a fibre optic network throughout the country that reaches small towns, panchayats and villages. We credit to the government & thankful for this futuristic thinking for having leveraged this great capability. There are hundreds of thousands of graduates who are unemployed or under employed who were waiting for jobs. There is a huge latent opportunity in rural India that can be harnessed.