Localization
For the mobile VAS to become popular in India, the local services are being offered in regional languages to enhance scalability. For catering the vernacular needs of the rural population, high quality of networks are being developed along with distribution and service infrastructure.

Localization is a prime driver in the growth of rural mobile VAS. Milind Pathak, co-CEO and country manager, Buongiorno says, "With a majority of million-odd new mobile connections per month coming from smaller and rural markets, operators and VAS players are getting big on local content."

Mitra explains, "India is a land of staggering language diversity and therefore, localization of mobile content remains a big challenge. The Indianization of the content is a long-term opportunity, which will increase consumption by entering the Indian mindspace."

Vernacularization is needed for new applications intended to reach emerging segments. The government is trying to ensure standardization in script etc, and this should help. Manufacturers and service providers need to make this collective effort for transition.

Localization is driving VAS content from pure entertainment to information based services. Local content has been developed in nearly eighteen languages for diverse services, such as sports, cooking recipes, fashion tips, etc. Localization can take place in applications such as 3D animation or games or weather forecasts, but surely not in mass categories such as music.

Efforts Galore
There are some breakthrough efforts from all segments of the telecom industry. Some of them have gained attention from every nook and corner of the country. To mention a few:

Reliance Communications' Grameen VAS Services: RCOM's Grameen Mobile VAS services is proposed to cover 500,000 Indian villages, and offer education, health and travel services, facilitate commerce and transactions. Services shall include Mandi Bhav (commodity prices), agriculture & animal husbandry updates, weath-er forecast, local information, Sam-achar (news), as well as community messaging. These shall be available in multiple Indian languages, and ac-cessible via voice portals, SMS, USSD and data. Grameen VAS is priced at Rs 15 per month.

Local Language SMS Products: CEWIT is developing the same in twenty-two Indian languages. It will be available in a year's time.

Grameenphone in Bangladesh and Sente in Uganda are two operators who are doing noteworthy work on innovation for rural VAS. Sente of Uganda has been providing the facility of buying mobile recharge coupons, transferring money, calling up the destined village mobile kiosks, and giving them the top-up code. Sente brings banking services to people where even conventional banking services are not available.

IBM's HSTP is developing a product to deal with one of the challenges in rural India-illiteracy. It is developing a solution for mobile banking through Internet voice response.

Bharti Airtel has brought Sukumar Ray's literary masterpiece 'Abol Tabol' on its VAS platform, as well as launched local content portals such as 'Oriya Dhamaal'. Airtel is also planning to venture into regional content development.

Mobile banking offering, such as Comviva's mobiquity solution-which enables operators and banks to tie up in order to deliver secure regulatory-compliant financial services to the unbanked-offers a model that is profitable for the service providers and affordable for the rural segments as well.

Spice Digital has developed information services in nearly eighteen languages for diverse services such as sports, cooking recipes, and fashion tips. This content is done mainly to meet regional aspirations.

CanvasM leverages its innovative infrastructure like selecting ring tones for CRBT just on Swap in form of smart posters, and enabling multi-factor authentication for banking services like fingerprint recognition, etc.

Traffic alerts, which have been launched by Idea Cellular, is also a very serious initiative for local content.

Challenges Ahead
The biggest challenge for the rural market is basically catering to the specific needs and demands of this segment. Consumer needs and demands of the rural sector are dictating the trends of mobile VAS. As Mitra points out, "The market expansion in this domain has to be catered ardently. This offers a wide scope for increasing revenues of the service providers and operators."

Agrees Passari, "Every operator has tons of VAS offerings. Most of them are not even known to the customers. And discovering the right offering at the right time becomes challenging. Thereby, the adoption remains miserably low. We need to work on the challenge collectively. We need some long–terms, industry-wide initiatives."

Low awareness for VAS restricted its growth in rural India, says a report. These rural areas, referred to as BoP, have a mere 10% awareness of mobile voting applications (competitions, real-time polling, live participation in TV/radio programs, etc).

According to Milind Pathak, "There are ample challenges in the rural sector-from access to mobile communication to consumer educa-tion to the distribution of handsets." He further adds that in order to make VAS services popular among the rural customers, it is important to provide services in the language they understand and via the media which they are comfortable in consuming. Dr Debasis Chatterji, CEO, Netxcell says, "The demographics and psychographics of rural mobile customers are totally different. The language in rural areas has been a challenge for the VAS players, especially with around twenty-six official regional languages."

Despite the huge network rollout in rural areas and the intense low tariff war amongst the operators, the study showed usage of VAS in rural areas to just 1%. As Atul Chaturvedi, COO, Idea Cellular puts, "The main challenge remains the collation of information from the aggregators to suit the needs of the customers."

Key to Success
Awareness and education in rural markets will be key to success of VAS. So, it is beyond products and technology. "Simplicity is the key. Something which would elevate the standard of living. We would like to design products which have zero learning requirement," asserts Passari.

Operators need to seed the market and create enough evangelists in the rural population to spread the conviction that money spent on VAS will not only be a great user experience but also help them in the long run in enhancing their capabilities. Working on some initiatives which is a combination of technology and community initiative will prove beneficial. This will certainly escalate the value added services in rural areas.

Archana Singh
archanasi@cybermedia.co.in