Kolkata

ITC has become the first Indian company and the second in the world to win the prestigious Development Gateway Award. It won the $100,000 Award for the year 2005 for its trailblazing ITC e-Choupal initiative which has achieved the scale of a movement in rural India. The Development Gateway Award recognizes ITC's e-Choupal as the most exemplary contribution in the field of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for development during the last 10 years. ITC e-Choupal won the Award for the importance of its contribution to development priorities like poverty reduction, its scale and replicability, sustainability and transparency. As the largest Information Technology (IT)-based corporate initiative in rural India, ITC e-Choupal was chosen from 135 nominations from across the world.

The Award, previously known as the Petersberg Prize, was presented today in Beijing at the Development Gateway Forum by Ms Frannie A. Léautier, Vice President of the World Bank Institute, in the presence of Mr. Austin Hu, Deputy Chief of Mission in Beijing for the World Bank, and Mr. Alan J. Rossi, CEO, Development Gateway Foundation. Chairman YC Deveshwar received the award on behalf of ITC.

Accepting the award, ITC Chairman Y C Deveshwar said, ``ITC e-Choupal demonstrates that the private sector can achieve synergy between creating shareholder value and rendering service to society. ITC e-Choupal is playing a transformational role in turning rural communities into vibrant economic organisations -- by fostering inclusive growth and enhancing their wealth creation capability. ITC is planning to extend the benefits of e-Choupal wider and deeper into India's villages by delivering educational services and essential healthcare, thereby enhancing the quality of life in rural India.'' Mr Deveshwar announced that ITC will supplement the award money of $100,000 with a matching contribution to support e-Choupal's educational services programme which will be launched in the coming months.

The Forum, co-hosted with the Government of China and the World Bank, brings together the leaders in IT and development sectors from around the world to address the theme of 'Information Technology and Collaborative Development.' The Development Gateway is an independent not-for-profit organization which helps improve people's lives in developing countries by building partnerships and information systems that provide access to knowledge for development. It was conceived by former World Bank President James Wolfensohn and initially developed under the aegis of the World Bank.

ITC e-Choupal has already received several national and international accolades as a unique transformation model for rural India. ITC's initiative has earlier won the inaugural `World Business Award' instituted in support of the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals. ITC e-Choupal also the Wharton-Infosys 'Enterprise Business Transformation Award 2004' for the Asia-Pacific region. The curriculum of the Harvard Business School now includes a case study on the ITC e-Choupal movement and how it is enabling a paradigm shift in Indian agriculture. The ITC e-Choupal strategy also forms part of management guru C.K.Prahlad's latest book, 'The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid'.

ITC e-Choupal today reaches out to and empowers over 3.5 million farmers over 31,000 villages by enabling them to readily access crop-specific, customised and comprehensive information in their local language. Vernacular websites relating to each agricultural crop that ITC deals in, created by the Company, provide real-time information to even the smallest marginal farmers on the prevailing Indian and international prices and price trends for their crop, expert knowledge on best farming practices, and micro-level weather forecast. This significantly improves the farmer's decision-making ability, thereby helping him better align his agricultural produce to market demand, ensure better quality, productivity and improved price discovery.

ITC's e-Choupal model helps aggregate demand by creating a virtual producers' co-operative, thus facilitating access to higher quality farm inputs at lower costs for the farmer. ITC e-Choupal also creates a direct marketing and fulfilment channel for rural India, eliminating intermediation and multiple handling, thus significantly reducing transaction costs and improving logistical efficiency.

ITC e-Choupal plans to launch educational services through the network in the coming months. ITC e-Choupal has also recently commenced a pilot project for providing rural health services in partnership with one of the leading private health service providers.

Over the next decade, the ITC e-Choupal network aims to cover over 100,000 Indian villages, representing 1/6th of rural India, and create more than 10 million e-farmers.

Click here for details on e-Choupal