Lending a helping hand in the fight against COVID-19, Boonbox on Monday announced the launch of Mission Lifeline Bharat to ensure regular supply of essential services in rural India. The mission has been launched in the states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Odisha to begin with.
Through this initiative, the company will ensure a continuous supply of medicines, FMCG goods (baby food, milk powder, biscuits, etc), sanitation products (sanitary napkins, disinfectants, diapers, gloves, masks, etc) and groceries (rice, wheat, pulses, sugar, salt, etc).
Boonbox is a rural assisted commerce platform, which sources and sells products ranging from consumer durables to FMCG (fast moving consumer goods), to customers in rural India.
Speaking about the initiative, Ramachandran Ramanathan, Founder of Boonbox, said they saw multiple scenarios emerging once the COVID-19 lockdown started. “One is clearly there is going to be a huge loss of livelihood in rural areas. That is quite logical. It was 4 weeks earlier and now extended to 6 weeks. But it is not about 6 weeks, because life is not a stop-start. It is quite possible that the underlying businesses where they are employed would have completely been demolished since much of the unorganised sector or small businesses can’t take this 6 weeks of uncertainty. So, we knew that rural would be the focus for everybody because 70% of the people live there.”
Adding that there are two problems in this scenario, he said, “One is supply chains will be broken which means that the products go to urban because there has been no production for most of this time. Whatever stock is there will go to urban which means you can estimate that it will take much longer to go to rural. So, during this time, consumption has to continue and we have the ability to reach 3,00,000 villages in India and hence, we moved to essentials.”
With livelihoods unlikely to revive overnight because of the sheer scale of the disaster, Ramachandran said that some of the consumers will become beneficiaries, which means that aid will need to be given to rural customers.
“The big problem is rural India is so fragmented. India has 6,50,000 villages where 87% are having a population of less than 2000. There is no connectivity between the villages, no reach and no distribution. Since we have these capabilities, we thought Boonbox is the pipe through which all kinds of organisations can put products and services through.”
Ramachandran said the company chose the states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Odisha because the scale of the problem is so big that concentrating on the states where it has the largest strength and which are the closest to it would be better. “If we are able to get adequate resources, we will go to all the 16 states where we are present,” he added.
Logistical challenges
Ramachandran said the first one is at the sourcing side itself. “Currently, products are not available and if they are available, they are at a price that may not be affordable. So, the challenge is not just in terms of the customer getting products that are expensive, but the challenge will be in terms of our own brand and reputation.”
Boonbox is now working directly with the manufacturers or the very large retailers so it gets the assurance on price, quality and quantity as well as choice, he added.
“Second challenge is we are hoping transport lines will get cleared. Our strength is the last mile, as we can cover from taluk level to village level. But we see a bigger constraint emerging over time which will be the customer’s ability to pay. People will still buy grocery and staples, but anything that is a discretionary spend, they will not spend at all,” Ramachandran said.
In fact, economies across the world are going to take a long time to recover and we do think that discretionary spends will be down for a long time. People will be geared towards survival and this will be the buzzword, he added.
The startup has initiated talks with state governments and foundations for support and is getting a good response but nothing has been crystallised as yet as the ecosystem is still in the lockdown phase.
“Reality is, the post COVID-19 situation is uncertain for everybody. So, I think everybody wants to calibrate their response depending on what the ground reality will be 3-4 weeks down the line,” Ramachandran noted.
