Low cost Blackberry lookalike from Airtel for rural customers

Bharti Airtel, IFFCO and Star Global have formed a 50:25:25 JV called IFFCO Kisan Sanchar to provide telephone services in rural areas. Apart from telephones, the company will provide rural products such as transistors, community radios, torches and lanterns with a battery life of three years.

While IFFCO will use its vast rural network for marketing the services, Airtel would be the service provider. Uptil now, 48000 farmers have joined the scheme and is targeted to have 15 crore customers by 2011.

Regarding the mobile handset, it is a Blackberry lookalike priced ar Rs.4000 and provide value added services such as free daily voice updates on mandi prices, farming techniques, weather forecasts and fertiliser availability in local languages. The small-screen version may cost around Rs 2,000.

In future IFFCO may launch its own mobile phone which can charge without power through a wind-up charger which can prove to be ablockbuster once it is launched.

With rural market growing, the move by Bharti will help it in increasing its subscriber base and gather more revenues from prospective rural mobile users.

Bharti Airtel will also provide call rates @50p per minute for calls between IFFCO members to provide community building and improve interaction.

The JV would work wonders for rural who have been deprived of timely and reliable information about their needs and products. It would help them in improving their productivity and contribute to overall development of country.

The move by Airtel could also be seen in light of abolition of ADC charge wherein mobile operators paid a usage charge to BSNL for fulfilling Universal Service Obligation. Now it is turn of private companies to expolit the full potential of the under served markets.