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Case Study

ITC CASE STUDY

Agriculture is vital to India. It produces 23% of GDP, feeds a billion people, and employs 66% of the workforce. Because of the Green Revolution, India’s agricultural productivity has improved to the point that it is both self-sufficient and a net exporter of a variety of food grains. Yet most Indian farmers have remained quite poor. The causes include remnants of scarcity-era regulation and an agricultural system based on small, inefficient landholdings. The agricultural system has traditionally been unfair to primary producers. Soybeans, for example, are an important oilseed crop that has been exempted from India’s Small Scale Industries Act to allow for processing in large, modern facilities. Yet 90% of the soybean crop is sold by farmers with small holdings to traders, who act as purchasing agents for buyers at a local, government-mandated marketplace, called a mandi. Farmers have only an approximate idea of price trends and have to accept the price offered them at auctions on the day that they bring their grain to the mandi. As a result, traders are well positioned to exploit both farmers and buyers through practices that sustain system-wide inefficiencies.

ITC is one of India’s leading private companies, with annual revenues of US$2 billion. Its International Business Division was created in 1990 as an agricultural trading company; it now generates US$150 million in revenues annually. The company has initiated an e-Choupal effort that places computers with Internet access in rural farming villages; the e-Choupals serve as both a social gathering place for exchange of information (choupal means gathering place in Hindi) and an e-commerce hub. What began as an effort to re-engineer the procurement process for soy, tobacco, wheat, shrimp, and other cropping systems in rural India has also created a highly profitable distribution and product design channel for the company—an e-commerce platform that is also a low-cost fulfillment system...