The Indian rural segment is set to witness a turf war as never before with ADAG’s Reliance Communications today announcing a range of initiatives targeted towards the sector. The company is pitching its mobile services as well as internet services to the rural folks.

The company has now devised a three-pronged strategy for its rural war chest. The first is to drive internet penetration across rural and sub-urban areas and branded as BharatNet plan, second is to thrust on high impact machine-to-machine solutions, named as M2M and lastly to provide value-added services which are specifically developed for rural needs. For the last aim the company unveiled its GrameenVAS bouquet of services to be available in 500,000 villages.

 Mr S P Shukla, President - Wireless, Reliance Communications said, "The Indian telecom wireless rural subscriber base is now over 125 million. The next wave of telecom growth is emerging from rural India. With rural base expected to double in the next few years, RCOM is committed to drive this exponential growth through innovative and ground breaking service offerings and tariffs."

Mr Mahesh Prasad, President - MDCS, Reliance Communications said, “Mobile is rapidly overcoming the challenge of universal access in rural areas. Our goal is to offer to this large rural population across India, innovative products and services customized for rural & local needs. Rural markets offer significant as well as large-scale opportunity to tap highly potential but relatively unaddressed market topography.”

BharatNet Plan: 

Reliance communications aims to target the 4 million PC users in rural India who need high speed net connectivity similar to those available in urban areas. This plan will be available in 20,000 rural locations across India and are considered to be a high-speed variant of Reliance’s NetConnect service. The speeds offered under these services will be about 153 kbps. The services can be availed for weekly rental of Rs 98 and download limits of 350 MB. Reliance says that the pricing falls under its sachet model. The services will be available across the rural India except for metros and top 100 cities.

Grameen VAS:

These VAS have been lined up offering services such as Mandi Bhav, Agriculture & Animal Husbandry Updates, Weather Forecast, Local Info, Samachar etc. all in multiple Indian Languages. The services are categorized under mLearning, mHealth, mCommerce, mUpdates and GroupSampark which is a Community Messaging service. The services can be offered under various medims such as Voice Portal, SMS, USSD, Data etc. The Grameen VAS is priced at a monthly rental of Rs.15.

Machine to Machine Applications (M2M):

Services under this vertical will basically be applications aiding automation, surveillance, remote monitoring and data gathering. The company foresees strong demand for such applications in automation of Agro & Irrigation services, water level monitoring, and data gathering for milk & agri-cooperatives, fisheries, poultry, and soil analysis.  

In urban areas the applications can be used in mobile ticketing, purchase@Kiosks and vending machines, and remote monitoring of office automation products.