Aaloo Hai, Gobi Hai

This  “Aaloo

Hai, Gobi Hai, Matar Hai, Palak Hai, Tamatar Hai.....” used to be a familiar

cry when I was a small boy in my hometown. The sabziwalaa would shout at the top

of his voice so that mothers/wives and maids would come out of their houses and

buy vegetables. While these ladies tried to bargain, they were not too

successful; the vegetable vendor would insist how much pains he takes to deliver

vegetables at their doorstep, and the additional money he wants in return is

nothing.

When I heard that the famous vegetable wholesale market of

Delhi, the Azadpur mandi, was going to be fully computerized, I was not

surprised. I believe that in India vegetable vendors are the still surviving

species from the barter system era that started not hundreds but thousands of

years ago. And they are still around. Surely, someone who knows the art of

surviving, has got to be smart.

Normally seen as people who are at the bottom of the social

pyramid, the vegetable sellers at these wholesale markets are one of the most

street-smart people I have known. They know: who is a big customer and will

spend a lot regularly; who is a small one timer and can be sold stale stuff to;

how to browbeat weak buyers; at what time of the day to hike or drop prices; how

to hide bad products in good; when to hold on to vegetables and wait for prices

to shoot up, and so on and so forth.

Most of these vendors are almost illiterate or semi

literate. And they do not have any experience of technology. Computers are being

given to not only get them better returns, but also to bring some kind of

discipline in the way they conduct business. In a way, they will see computers

as a business enabler, and at the same time, they will be very careful not to

let technology come in the way of various undesirable means which they use to

make money.

Studying how the Azadpur mandi members use IT will be a big

learning point, worth a case study. The success as well as the failure points

will go very far in understanding how a common Indian adapts to and can adapt to

IT.

Quite a few similar projects are being done all over the

country. If someone compile the learnings from all of them, it will be a

wonderful guide to understanding the Indian psyche. I think, today, both

equipment and solution vendors, as well as e-Governance project managers badly

lack this knowledge. They try their best to force-fit equipment, solutions as

well as business models, rather than learn from these experiences and work out

solutions that work.

Today most of the success stories in IT that we read about

are happening in enterprises that are run by people who have global exposure and

experience, have the best business environment available in the country to

support them, and have already got lots of other established models to emulate.

But success of computerization in the Azadpur mandi of Delhi, or the Hapur

pulses wholesale market are true tests of how IT is implemented and accepted in

entire India.

It is therefore very important that these become role

models, not just for the Government, but even for the vendors and solutions

providers who did not have that big a challenge when dealing with sophisticated

enterprise users. Growth is now going to come much less from the big users in

the metros and large cities, but much more from this level of applications in

far off places in the country. It is therefore important that the Azadpur sabzi

mandi be very closely watched.