In partnership with a non-profit organisation called ISAP, the Nasscom Foundation and Google established a call centre to assist women farmers in growing their businesses.
According to Nasscom Foundation CEO Nidhi Bhasin, the programme is being operated as a pilot to initially reach out to 20,000 rural women entrepreneurs across six states: Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, and Rajasthan.
“DigiVaani will be one place where rural women entrepreneurs will be able to call and get the information around various schemes available for them, which can help them scale up their business, be it government scheme or any other information that can be of help for them. The call centre will also pro-actively reach out to rural women entrepreneurs whose data is being made available to them,” Bhasin said.
She stated that Google had provided funding for the initiative and that a decision to scale up DigiVaani will be made after a year.
“We are working with partners and making them aware of our service to reach out to rural women entrepreneurs,” Bhasin said.
With a combined staff of 19, the Indian Society of Agribusiness Professionals (ISAP) offices in Delhi and Lucknow have established a DigiVaani call centre.
“Google.org is a philathropic arm of Google which has given grant of USD 500,000 to Nasscom Foundation to promote women entrepreneurship. We have realised that with labour participation rates going down for women, the next leap has to be women entrepreneurship,” Google India & Southeast Asia Vice President, Marketing, Sapna Chadha said.
According to her, Google conducted a study with Bain Capital that demonstrated that women-owned businesses can provide more than 25% of the workforce needed over the course of the next 30 to 40 years.
“DigiVaani will be one place where rural women entrepreneurs will be able to call and get the information around various schemes available for them, which can help them scale up their business, be it government scheme or any other information that can be of help for them. The call centre will also pro-actively reach out to rural women entrepreneurs whose data is being made available to them,” Bhasin said.
