Mobile Battle to Win India's Rural Customers

The race continues for mobile phone manufacturer's to obtain market share of the virtually un-touched rural community in India. In the past 6 months there have been many news articles, stories & announcements by handset manufacturer's about new services & offerings to attract rural customers.
For example Nokia launched a mobile handset costing the equivalent of about US$44, its lowest price globally for the handset, in partnership with Reliance Communication, one of India's largest, and publically held, telephone service providers. (Reliance has already been offering GrameenPhone services in it's effort to offer lower cost phone usage.) Smart partnering move by Nokia, since Reliance has been forging it's way into rural villages, recently rolling out telephone connections to 40,000 villages.

According to industry estimates in India, the rural markets contribute about 5% of the national GSM handset sales. But this is expected to rise to 25-30% by 2009. Though 70% of the population resides in rural markets, penetration of the mobile handset is under 3% against 40% in urban regions. The 1.2 billion population of the country is split 70:30 between rural and urban areas and industry analysts maintain that 60% of growth henceforth would come from rural markets. There are 423 large towns in the country, 4,728 small towns and 6,00,000 villages. No surprise then that handset players like Nokia, Motorola, Samsung & LG have already identified Indian villages as future growth targets. Besides distribution partnerships, like Motorola's deal with e-choupal, many of these companies are also investigating microfinancing models to boost their reach in rural areas. These schemes could include partnering with Banks and/or Telco providers...many of whom already have rural presence or at least advanced plans in reaching rural markets.

Is it clear however, to the end-consumer paying for the service, what they could benefit from the service to improve their business or livelihood? Who reaps the largest benefit of mobile proliferation?