RuralShores – Corporate Social Responsibility – Innovative Indian Startup – Rural BPO
By Chandramouly Rathinasababathy on 19 February, 2010, 3:31 pm
Have you ever heard of the term CSR – Corporate Social Responsibility. A new dimension of entrepreneurship, extending the IT industry to rural populace of India. RuralShores is once such company and won the runner up award for Best Innovative Startup by NASSCOM recently and the winner in the category was an another startup company called TringMe. RuralShores founded in 2008, it is trying to create a social impact by providing opportunity to the rural community. It got recently funded by Lok Capital LLC with a disclosed amount. RuralShores is targeting to set up around 500 centres across the country in over a period of six years, which is unbelievable.
RuralShores focused on Business Process Outsourcing areas which include Forms Data Capture, document processing, image based data capture,etc., The average cost to run an BPO industry in a places like Bangalore Electronic City or Chennai Tidel Parks is very huge. So moving the service industries to rural areas will drastically reduce the cost of running the company and also the resource cost is very less. The compelling business model lies in the empowerment of rural people who are ready to take the white collar jobs with an extra commitment and also to make differences in their lifestyles. These employees are not Engineering grads from IITs or management professionals from IIMs, they may have qualifications of minimum +2 pass with English read/write skills, medium type-writing skills or average graduates with basic soft skills and computer skills like MS Word, Excel, etc., Because those Office tools are the key behind Outsourcing industry like document processing where in, they will be dealing with document verification, get the work done quickly, etc.,
Bagepalli(Karnataka) RuralShores Center
The management team of RuralShores is very strong to take the company to next level and to grow as a team in a rapid speed. From the inception, the company is having a phenomenal growth by having a strategical partnership with HDFC Ltd (which is holding 26% equity). And recently, VC funding from Lok Capital is another milestone for RuralShores growth.
Eventhough the business model looks very promising and will definitely create a socio-economic impact on rural populace. The question is, if the trained people from rural move out Urban like its happening in other industries. Then this model will be facing real challenges to train more people and fill the gaps quickly. Also growing urban spaces and shrinking rural boundaries of big cities like Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi has an advantage & disadvantage for companies like RuralShores.
Company Profile
- Company : RuralShores, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
- Founded : 2008
- Funded by : Lok Capitals LLC
- Strategy Partner: HDFC Ltd
Appreciable work done by the company for people They raised their social responsibility which is good news for the Indian people They get good knowledge It is very nice and cool.