In Rural India, a Sales Force in Saris Delivers Soap, Social Change
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
CHOLLERU, India — With its open sewers and mud-walled homes, this impoverished farming village of 2,200 in southern India did not look like fertile territory for an entrepreneur. But Srilatha Kadem was undeterred. Oblivious to the midday heat, she marched briskly along the unpaved streets, her cloth bag filled with soaps and shampoos and her heart with vaulting ambition.
She stopped at a tile-roofed house, where a gray-haired woman in a green sari lounged in the shade of the small verandah. “You’re charging the same as the shops,” the woman said grumpily.
“There is a difference in quality,” replied Kadem, a cheerful woman with silver toe rings and a fifth-grade education who works as a saleswoman for Hindustan Lever Ltd., the Indian subsidiary of the Dutch consumer products giant Unilever. “What you buy on the streets, it doesn’t come from a good company. These products which I brought are from a good company.”
Consumer culture, spurred by rapid economic growth, is spreading to the vast rural hinterlands where two-thirds of India’s 1.1 billion people still live. The trend is creating new opportunities not just for big business, which has long focused on the urban middle class, but also for some of India’s poorest citizens.
