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The TARAhaat.com |
Name of the project: Presentation of TARAHaat.com, Development Alternatives, New Delhi “Experiments in the use of New Age Communication Technologies at the grassroots level” By Shrashtant Patara Mr. S. Patara, Manager, Technology Systems Branch and Tara Nirman Kendra, Development Alternatives, New Delhi made a presentation on the TARAHaat.com initiative of DA. TARAHaat.com is DA's experiment and initiative to bring the Internet, e-commerce and cyber-cafes to the rural areas. They have initiated these activities in the Bundelkhand region – their field area. It links the user to information services, government agencies, and is also a super bazaar that provides access to the kind of services and products that rural India needs. Mr. Pankaj Khanna, Development Alternatives, had presented TARAHaat.com in the December Workshop held in Visakhapatnam. Mr. Patara, however, brought out some more points relating to the market aspects of the venture. TARAHaat.com is based on a purely corporate model. The shares for this venture were bought by the employees, friends and well wishers of DA. It has a paid up capital of Rs. 120,000. It is meant to develop into an e-commerce site over a period of time. The venture has been franchised to various small franchisees in the Bundelkhand region of Madhya Pradesh. It is being used by people for a variety of purposes – e-learning courses, buying and selling goods, booking railway tickets, matrimonials & horoscopes etc. Surprisingly, the largest part of the revenue comes from e-learning courses – and that too those which are on English speaking and Personality Development!! These kinds of ventures require a lot of facilitation from the state governments and have to be scalable to become working market models. Mr. Patara also narrated their experience about another of their initiatives – an evaluation tool based on eco-socio-financial indicators to assess the sustainability of building practices – from the stakeholders' point of view and from the point of view of the professionals. It would set in place a formal system of measuring the indicators and assigning them scores and weightages and also a way forward for taking it further by maximum application in the field by a Community of Practitioners. They have found that the outputs of both these groups though have a certain amount of factors in common, are significantly different. BundelKhand is a region in Madhya Pradesh |
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