One of the first things that Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg did after arriving in India last week, was to visit Kamoda village in Rajasthan.It was part of Sandberg’s personal commitment to a non-profit organisation working in the area of education, sanitation and healthcare.
For Sandberg, rural India is not new. Back in 1991 she worked on a World Bank project on leprosy which took her to non-urban areas in the country. Her experiences over the last two decades should have made her realise that if Facebook has to achieve its stated target of reaching a billion Indians, it has to become much more than what it is today.
As of now, Facebook is essentially an urban phenomenon where internet usage is growing and people are always looking for platforms to project their cool quotient.
Other online platforms such as Yahoo, Rediff and AOL also have a similar strategy of offering a bunch of services that primarily competes for the same set of users.
If Facebook has to make itself relevant to a wider set of consumers, especially in countries like India, it will have to use technology to make applications that are relevant to larger masses of people. Initiatives like internet.org that aims to provide users access to basic connectivity through partnerships with telecom operators and handset-makers need to be scaled up.
The bigger challenge, however, would be to ensure that once access is provided, users know what to do with it. Voice telephony proliferated to 900 million users because there’s an inherent need to talk. In the case of internet there’s just the lack of knowledge. Google, for example, is experimenting on how it can use its Hangout service to reach quality education to villages.
To her credit, Sandberg acknowledged the point that Facebook has to move into areas like education and e-governance. This needs to be followed up with some serious investments here. With a 100 million user base here, India is now the second largest country for Facebook after the US. Growth in internet penetration will no doubt add to India’s GDP but it will also add to Facebook’s GDP. Hopefully, on her next visit to India, Sandberg will be able to tell us stories of how the women of Kamoda are increasing their productivity by using internet services in addition to what they make from selling goat’s milk.
Corporate Editor