The north-western rural villages of Rohtak, Haryana, never have been a place of limelight, but they accidentally have seen farmers’ homes transfigured into popular movie sets, courtesy recently emerged start-up STAGE.
Started by Vinay Singhal, who’s on a mission to create a vibrant film industry in an area that has for the most part seen minimal cinematic production, STAGE is finding ways to get its name out to filmmakers and communities across India. Singhal said that before STAGE in 2019, only a couple of dozen Haryanvi films were produced. Nowadays, they have done more than 200 films, according to the taste and flavor of provincial audiences.
Content on STAGE is localised for local dialects,
With an immense focus on hyper-local storytelling. The app has films available so far in two dialects: Rajasthani and Haryanvi. The company has three million paid subscribers. Apart from MAITHILI and KONKAN, the firm is looking for finance from American investors, who are interested in the growth of the firm.
Growing Rural Market Opportunities
This is a better pointer to an even bigger trend about Indian start-ups that are targeting rural markets which have been overlooked traditionally by tech innovation. With India housing 1.4 billion people, who reside in its 650,000 villages, it is surprising that fewer start-ups were trying to take advantage of the opportunity. That made little sense given the intense focus of the recent tech boom on the vast urban populations of India but more and more entrepreneurs today are beginning to see the potential for rural consumers. For example, Accel Ventures is putting investment into rural-focused start-ups and has recently declared plans to commit up to $1 million in this sector.
Two-thirds of India’s population resides in rural space,
Which spends about $500 billion every year, according to a report by Accel. The best kind of customer among rural folks spends more than the urban citizen, which tells about the value of the market. That surplus in the next decade will garner an additional amount of $4 trillion for the GDP, and digitally influenced growth is estimated to open up incrementality worth another $200 billion in the rural space.
The major reason driving this transition is increasing smartphone penetration. After all, at a time when there are nearly 450 million smartphone users in India, half of them inhabiting rural regions, the digital business world is changing fast. Digital payment methods, especially UPI, have made transactions faster and amplified the rural consumer’s access to the market.
Challenges Ahead
However, targeting consumers in rural India comes with its own set of challenges. Rural consumers tend to be very price-sensitive and dispersed. The market penetration becomes really tough in such cases. Once again, the deficient infrastructure hampers smooth distribution, making operations costly. “Traditional models of urban businesses fail miserably in the rural context,” says Gautam Malik of Frontier Markets. The companies should first establish trust within local communities to engage with them effectively.
For instance, Malik’s firm had to connect with the local women entrepreneurs to have them as agents for sales and delivery; through such an approach, trust would be instilled while ensuring delivery at the last mile to the point of delivery. Long-term commitment and adaptability to ‘local needs’ would be fundamental requirements if, indeed, the target population turns out to be rural.
India’s rural market will play a very pivotal role in emerging as the potential and lucrative segment in the increasing film industry, especially in Haryana, that will see more start-ups like STAGE.