Government of India has reportedly introduced online shopping stores specially designed for rural India. The government is planning to provide essentials to rural India with this initiative.
As per a report by Times of India, the new portal has been LED by the Common Service Centres, which falls under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. The report highlights that the stores are set up and run by private individuals and the new platform will provide sale and supply of essential commodities like vegetables, milk, pulses, fruits and other products.
With this, customers living in rural areas can go online and order supplies through a specially curated application that has been provided to village-level entrepreneurs (VLEs) or those who are in charge of retail and other CSC activities. The VLEs also takes offline orders. The report highlights once the VLEs receives order from the app, they try and deliver the products within a period of few hours to a day at most.
Moving on, the VLE is allowed to cover a radius of 5-10 km and the report highlights that the new e-retail chain has seen 5,000 orders to the tune of Rs 20 lakh. “The project is still in its infancy, but we plan to scale up very fast and reach 10,000 CSCs by the end of May and around one lakh by the end of the year,” CSC CEO Dinesh Tyagi told the publication.
The new move could be the bridging gap between rural India and online marketplace. Although e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Flipkart are quite famous in the urban areas, in rural areas, its reach is limited. The e-commerce platforms are not able to deliver goods to these remote areas due to a number of reasons including tough terrain, lack of confirmed postal address and more. With this, the gap between rural India and online shopping can be finally filled.