COVID-19 and rural India: The challenges and opportunities for marketers

Dialogue Factory’s Sharad Varshney looks at how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected rural India and what brands can learn about this huge market.

This article is part of a Spotlight series on rural marketing in India. Read more

COVID-19 impacted the Indian economy deeply and rural is no exception. Rural today constitutes a large part of the economy and overall consumption across product categories in the country. But we need to understand the impact of the pandemic on rural from a different perspective.

In India, 126 million marginal and small farmers together own about 74.4 million hectares of land (Agricultural Census 2015-16, pg 14) with an average holding of just 0.6 hectares each. Poor price realisation, high transaction cost...

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