Technology for MSMEs: Access to the digital market is a function of digital preparedness. There are several struggles that create a digital divide.
Technology for MSMEs: Covid came with its negatives and disturbed normal functioning. However, it opened up newer opportunities too. An area of prime importance here is the adoption of digitization. For MSMEs, digitization has mostly opened up opportunities in two forms – financial transactions and market access. While regular physical markets dried up and are showing extremely slow recovery, the markets – both next door as well as the far-off ones, have opened up digitally.
Access to the digital market is a function of digital preparedness. There are several struggles that create a digital divide here. First and foremost is the language barrier. English is not the language of the masses. There is a need for real-time conversion of information from English to regional languages. This has been addressed through scan coding in the payment gateways but is a big hindrance to market access for 55 million own accounts (broadly household) enterprises (OAEs).
Another major issue in market promotion is product and mood photography. The cost and capacity of doing such photography at desired regular intervals are prohibitive and in the absence of such affordable services, despite an apparent low entry barrier to enter the digital market, in reality, it prohibits the entry of the OAEs and broadens the digital divide. A solution can come in three steps – providing appropriate infrastructure, enabling last-mile service provision, and capacity building of users.
Firstly, basic tools of photography and videography like studio set-up, light, camera, usage of services of models and props, etc. are an expensive proposition. Without such quality infrastructure, photographs of desired quality and mood-setting are not possible. Simultaneously, there will be a need for digital infrastructure in the form of tablets and smartphones at the user level. Secondly, even if such items are made available, there is a need for trained personnel to put those to use. Also, such photographs need to be upgraded over a period of time, say at least twice a year, which is an expensive proposition. Thirdly there will be a need for capacity creation at the OAE level to utilize the new age marketing tools and accordingly, there will be a need for training in how to register, how to use, etc., and that too in local vernacular.
The strategy for providing this service will be in three steps. Firstly a beginning has to be made. One can start the process with the artisanal (handicraft and handloom) clusters, which are mostly all OAEs. The average cluster size is 300 to 500 artisans and there are 3500 of them (clusterobservatory.in). Although the artisan number is high, the products of the artisans are not very dissimilar. Because of various interventions in the clusters in the past as also the ongoing ones, as on date, there must be around 10,000 such artisan organizations placed across 700 odd districts. Besides, there may be an estimated 100,000 master artisans in these clusters, who would also like to create their own portfolios. These artisan clusters can be the starting point.
How many such centres and where is the second issue. The strategy can be creating a Digital Shashakti Kendra (DSK), at least one, in each district. It can be housed at the District Industry Centre (DIC), which has a good understanding of the challenges of a cluster in its District. Each DIC through a public-private partnership (PPP) mode can open a DSK in an equipment and service fee-sharing model with a private partner. A DSK at a subsidized rate can provide the following services: (a) smartphone/tablet library (hiring service) and (b) photography and videography of products and processes. Thirdly, the desired user training and requisite training material can be provided in local vernacular to OAEs by creating district-level trainers.
Not the least, in a country where the dialect changes every 50 kilometres and has such a wide diversity of languages, we need to create software which can translate meaningfully communications in English into the desired languages in real-time. We also will need to provide bandwidth infrastructure to the remotest corners of the country.
Attribution-Financial Express
