‘We have tied up with almost all major telecom operators to reach the rural people’
Please brief us about your partners in reaching out to the masses.
We, at Handygo, offer mobile based solutions to the farmers. We provide them the latest information regarding agriculture, weather, health, education, finance, livestocks, fisheries, etc, among others. ‘ Behtar Zindagi’, one of our flagship products and an IVR based solution, focuses on the upliftment of the rural society in a range of areas such as WAP productivity & income, health, financial inclusion, career, and education. Behtar Zindagi is available in 18 different languages and dialects which reduce the language barrier. Through this rural initiative, we are poised to reduce the dependency of the farmers on agents for the most basic information.
For our Behtar Zindagi products, we have tied up with almost all the major telecom operators—Idea, airtel, Uninor, Tata, Reliance, etc, to reach the rural people. With the government, through NTP 2012, also laying emphasis on the spread of mobile services in the rural regions, we have already forayed there and introduced m-governance, m-health, m-commerce, m-education, and m-entertainment services.
Behtar Zindagi has established itself as a one-stop-solution provider for the rural segment.
Handygo’s major focus is on IVR (interactive voice response) based services, what are your major IVR offerings?
Handygo offers Value Added Services (VAS) through mobile entertainment and content across video, messaging, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), and Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) platforms. Our major IVR offerings are Behtar Zindagi; Ehsaas— sexual literacy; Fame on Game an exclusive Games portal on IVR; Mobi Shiksha—education and employment; Soochna Shakti— rural women empowerment, etc.
We always wanted to cater the masses. That’s why these products are designed by IVR and complimented by mobile internet because IVR removes the literacy barrier and thus makes it easier for people to use it as and when required. For example, we have 50 doctors and many hospitals on roll for our health services segment. However we are in the process of giving the final shape to our plans and will soon come up with some announcements. However it would be too early to reveal the same. To create the awareness about the products, we are doing lot of promotional activities as well.
The VAS players need to delink partially from the operators and start focusing on non-operator business in a big way. What is your view on this?
It’s a very good thought and we also believe that we should focus on non-operator business as well. We have already foreseen the complexities of the business without the operators and that’s why we are already working on developing our business strategies around this thought for the past 3 years.