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Rediff.com  » Business » Rural women retailers earn meagre returns

Rural women retailers earn meagre returns

By Shruti Sabharwal & Pradipta Mukherjee in Bangalore/Kolkata
April 30, 2007 02:51 IST
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Rural retail seems to be keeping a lot of women in villages across the country on their toes.

But their profits are meagre or, at best, satisfactory, depending on their deal with private companies keen to reach rural customers.

Nagamma, 38, of Sadaholalu village in Mandya district of Karnataka, for example, travels 2 km around her village every day selling little packets of Wheel Active, Fair & Lovely cream, and Lifebuoy soap. She has a clientele of 150 families.

Her co-villager Lakshmi does this work in two villages every day.

Their earnings every month: Rs 500 to Rs 1,000, or 10 per cent of what they sell. Most of this goes into repaying the high-cost loans that they raise to pay deposits that enable them to pick up products to sell.

Nagamma and Lakshmi are saleswomen hired by Hindustan Lever Ltd and Emami to sell their products at places where there are no shops, no transport, and probably little purchasing power.

The companies have tied up with village women through NGOs and state agencies in at least 15 states, including Bengal, Assam, Karnataka, Maharashtra, MP and even backward regions like Orissa.

Despite the demands on their time and energy and the relatively low returns, women at most places are trying to make the most of the opportunity by borrowing ever-higher amounts to retail products.

Nagamma, for instance, took three loans from a cooperative society to buy face cream and soap - Rs 5,000 the first time, Rs 8,000, the second and Rs 10,000 the third time.

In Mysore, however, the debts are managed by self-help groups as a whole and are therefore not burdensome, said WiIliam D'Souza, programme officer of Myrada, an NGO that helps these companies sell products in villages. The self-help group has to deposit Rs 5,000 before it is given products.

Over and above, companies often pay the women in kind. In Mandya, for instance, women are given mobile handsets and pre-paid cards worth Rs 420. In turn, the women sell the calls to villagers and make some extra money.

HLL says it has covered about 2,600 villages in Karnataka and the project will become really profitable once it manages to cover the remaining 700-800 villages.

In Bengal, HLL's strategy has been slightly different. For every sale worth Rs 4,000, the women get Rs 1,000. And HLL says it doesn't demand any deposits.
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Shruti Sabharwal & Pradipta Mukherjee in Bangalore/Kolkata
Source: source
 

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