Making village level entrepreneurs; IFFCO style

It is a success story-a story which tells us how a genuine co-op can alter the lives of rural youths and convert them into what is known as Village Level Entrepreneurs. And the scene is unfolding not far away but in Jalna district of Maharashtra. Read on

IFFCO had arranged a tie-up with Common Service Centers CSC, a GOI initiative in August last year to explore synergies in taking e-commerce to rural and remote locations and the agreement has begun showing good results. Maharashtra based Jalna MH CSC VLE cooperative society is training the representatives of Village Level Entrepreneurs for distribution of the IFFCO products to the farmers.

This society is located at Jalna district of Maharashtra which has about 935 villages with 640 Village level entrepreneurs centers. About 120 VLE are already involved in selling the IFFCO products like Urea, Pesticides, Sagarika and others to the farmers at reasonable costs.

While talking to this correspondent, Jalna Field Officer of IFFCO Ashok Sakale informed “IFFCO has signed an MoU with CSC last year in August 2017 in the presence of Union IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. Later, we applied for the registration of Jalna MH CSC VLE cooperative society and were given the license for selling fertilizer of IFFCO through VLEs. The latter are helping farmers with Adhaar Card and other paper works “he said.

“We have organised seminars and workshops to motivate VLEs’ representatives into diversifying their businesses and start new businesses with low capital. These entrepreneurs are placing their orders through CSC portal and remit payment online”, Sakale said.

The MH CSC VLE cooperative society is also planning to develop the mobile APPs to provide the information about VLE centers and the availability of products, he informed.

It was thorough a tweet of IFFCO MD Dr U S Awasthi that we came to know about this unique initiative which has potential of rewriting the fate of rural India.

In his tweet IFFCO MD Dr U S Awasthi wrote, “Glad to share that @CSCegov_ adopted first ever a unique concept of #digital #cooperative society CSC #Jalana society in #maharashtra. It is identified as #IFFCO role model society in #CSC ecosystem. Congratulations Sh. @rsprasad for your initiative of @CSCegov_ #DigitalIndia”.

It bears recall that the CSC has partnered with IFFCO to market all products and service offerings of IFFCO and Group Companies through Digital Seva portal. Under this service, VLE accepts a significant quantity of orders from farmers for agri-inputs and other services,