In rural India, villagers live without easy access to trade, government, business and health services. This makes them easy prey for intermediaries who control the supply chain of products and services and can demand high payments to allow villagers access to it. In addition to this, there is a high opportunity cost for availing these services as any transaction involves long travel and loss of daily wage.

The inaccessibility of information affects the rural poor more than other sections of the society.  The rural poor, being resource deficient, lack easy access to the information necessary to allow them to efficiently run their businesses and become informed and participative citizens. Women, the elderly and low income and caste segments are the worst sufferers as their access to means is most limited. In this context, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can play a significant role in making information and services available at a reasonable cost.  

Drishtee is a for-profit organization incorporated in the year 2000 to create and implement a sustainable, scalable platform of entrepreneurship for enabling the development of rural economy and society with the use of ICT. Through a tiered franchise and partnership model, Drishtee facilitates the establishment of ICT nodes enabling access to information as well as local services to the rural community at nominal value. The business model is driven by the village entrepreneur, who owns the village node to operate a self-sustaining, profitable kiosk. The kiosk provides access to information like government records, agricultural data, and health insurance; help in filing of applications for licenses, certificates, compensations, and benefits; commodity product rates in different markets; education like computer courses, and Spoken English Programs. The entrepreneur earns by charging the community a nominal fee for the services provided. Drishtee has a fixed sharing with the Kiosk operator and a variable revenue sharing with the service providers. The Social Return on Investment Analysis shows that for every US$1 of social cost incurred, US$20 of social benefit is generated.

Drishtee has successfully demonstrated this concept in over 1000 kiosks across 6 states in India. Each Kiosk caters to approximately 1200 households, majority of which have an aggregated income of less than $ 2 a day. With a vision to reach out to every village in the country and beyond, Drishtee has set for itself an ambitious target of reaching out to 10,000 Villages in the next 2 years. Over a longer a period, Drishtee is geared up to become an electronic Wal-Mart for rural world.