Exclusive and subjective are the keys: The poor people are different across India except their poverty thanks to a uniform poverty parameter. By saying that I mean there’s no single theory or survey that could capture all the factors at one go. It is not possible practically. It is because the poor people across India react to factors of change differently. And that’s the reason many times products, that exclusively target the rural population, fail because companies tend to generalise about entire India banking upon its representative sample in some pockets of India. It is highly flawed. We can look into this in detail by examples. For example, price elasticity of demand is a concept which measures unit change in total demand because of one unit of price change. Now, this largely depends on the preferred basket of goods and services of that person. This basket of goods and services will have products that will have their individual price elasticity which has a lot to do with the region. A rupee increase in the price of rice will make less impact in the total demand of rice in the rural West Bengal than in Uttar Pradesh. This is because of the eating habits. Now a survey in Uttar Pradesh by a rice marketing company may well give red signal to go ahead with price change though the reality could be different. Likewise, the perception about IT and industry is different in different parts of India. Hence, many times government’s industrialization spree acts as boomerang. A farmer in Gujrat is more open to development and industry, whereas, for a farmer in West Bengal a good government is one that secures his right over his land. Now knowing that poor in different parts react to factors differently, it’s imperative to know and understand their sentiments, which largely affects their purchasing decisions - basket of goods and services, separately. Food habits, importance to education and sanitation etc. are mostly historical and come integrated with accessibility. Chronic inaccessibility of some resources for years gives birth to new habits by reducing dependency on those resources which in the long run makes it unimportant. It’s worth mentioning here is, chronic inaccessibility to sanitation for years made toilets redundant in the rural areas and affected not only the health of the rural population but also the urban. And taking the long term perils of open defecation (Spears, 2013) it’s highly necessary for the government to spend more on social sectors. These aspects are functionally related to the regions, history, and culture which have great influence on the economic decisions. Hence, we need to build a platform which studies predominant condition, potential and aspirations exclusively and subjectively on that area. A chain of chapters of Institute of Rubanomics may well serve this purpose.
Posted on: Tue, 02 Jul 2013 10:41:24 +0000
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