Boosting Rural Entrepreneurship Through India's Common Services Centres: An Agile Grassroots-based Approach

The case discusses the development and implementation of a unique - and indeed, one of the world's largest - telecenter scheme, the "Common Services Centres" (CSC). The CSC scheme engaged rural entrepreneurs to meet the twin goals of ensuring last-mile delivery of e-governance services as well as supporting the development of indigenous entrepreneurship. The former has been a long-standing element of the government's plans to create a "Digital India", while the latter is geared towards serving as a source of employment generation and income growth to drive nation development. While highlighting contrasts between the different kinds of entrepeneurship that exist (specifically necessity/subsistence vs innovative entrepeneurship), the case also discusses in detail the unique challenges faced by subsistence entrepreneurs, which are likely to be common to all emerging economies, and how this scheme sought to address them through the deployment of innovative technologies. The case offers a high-level view into the creation and implementation of the CSC scheme, the processes of iteration and improvement it underwent, and the broad challenges it continues to face.

Learning Objectives

To help graduate students of public policy, public administration, and business administration understand the nature, drivers, and impacts of necessity entrepreneurship and large social enterprises in emerging economies, the players involved in driving such processes, and trade-offs for each.