Startups, Design Thinking and Rural India

Empathy — the ability to understand and share feelings of others. It is the ability to be in a person’s shoes (or user for that matter) and understand what he actually thinks, does, feels and tells. Process of integrating all the above results is empathy mapping. It is a designer-perspective which takes into consideration thoughts, emotions and actions of a subject. Combination of both these approaches is nowadays being used by entrepreneurs, product managers and innovators known as Design Thinking.

Diary excerpts from Vasudha — rural camp of SOPAN

Jhabua, a district of Madhya Pradesh, shares its boundaries with Rajasthan and Gujrat. The villages there have a unique way of habitation, wherein every household build its house in respective fields implying that when you visit the villages of this district you will find scattered houses all over the hilly terrain and not in clusters. They have found a way to cultivate crops in such a harsh terrain and are doing so by sheer grit and smartness encompassing the entire region with pleasant greenery. Signs of development are visible — round the clock electricity, well constructed roads, brightly colored walls of primary schools depicting logo of ‘Sarva Shishka Abhiyaan’ and toilets in front of each hut. In that moment, when one cruises to destination, passing along this wonderful view, it may appear that life here is wonderful. Maybe life in villages is not that bad after all; the developmental work done has made things better.

Upon close inspection of one such village it is evident that life is not that easy after all. The typical problems which we read about still exist. But for the time being let us focus on one remarkable observation — recently constructed toilets under the Swacch Bharat Abhiyaan are being used for storing cattle-feed or grains or in some places for rearing chickens. Now it might seem that the villagers are ignorant, not willing to change, uneducated and that is why are making such a use of Rs. 20,000 subsidized infrastructure. But is it so? Or are we missing something?

The answer lies in the lack of design thinking/empathy mapped product design. This is exactly what is seen (or rather not seen) in the design of toilets installed in rural areas, originally designed for city/town settlements. Single usage of such toilet demands 10–15 lts (pessimistic limits) of water per user. Typical households in rural India are still joint families with an average of 7–8 members tallying daily water requirement to an approximate of 90–100 lts. In villages of Jhabua, Maharatwada, Vidharba (Maharashtra) and many other rural parts of India where the majority of population still fetch utility water for households from a distance of 1–2 kms, how on earth is it even remotely possible to manage 90 lts of water on a daily basis! Also, the money demarcated for building toilets does not include an over-head water tank, necessary for functioning of our city-designed toilets. What it shows is that in spite of the proactive measures by government; technologists, designers, innovators are failing to design for this huge section of Indian population.

A similar problem is identified by Jonathan Bill in the recent trend of Indian startups and product managers. Copying models of other startups from the west without customizing them and designing products by keeping in mind only the top 10% of Indian population is further widening the urban-rural (TOP-BOP) divide. Now is a high time for us, as Indians, to look at our problems with an Indian framework, design products keeping in mind our local conditions and evolve startups for high volume-low value growth cycle with an integral view of the society.

विश्व स्वधर्म सूर्यें पाहो । जो जे वांच्छिल तो तें लाहो । — Sant Gyaneshwar

(May the world see sunshine in each individual’s way of life and may everyone receive everything they wish for)

(The above episode from villages of Jhabua is experienced recently during my 3 days residential visit to Shivaganga, Jhabua arranged by SOPAN — Society for Profound Assimilation of National Ideas)

If you have taken out time to read it till the end, I request you to give your views/comments and feedback.