Handygo Technologies, a New Delhi-based wireless solutions provider of mobile entertainment and value-added services, will be investing Rs 120 crore to expand the reach of ‘Behtar Zindagi’, its flagship interactive voice response (IVR)-based solution, to more states in the country within the next one year.
Launched in 2009, Behtar Zindagi, currently available in 18 languages and dialects, focuses on strengthening farmers and their communities with information regarding market prices, agricultural and cropping advisory, livestock advisory, weather information, finance, education, and women and child healthcare through a common short code – 556780.
“With this investment, to be funded internally, we aim to expand the service to 100,000 villages across Rajasthan, Punjab, Karnataka, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh,” Praveen Rajpal, chief executive officer of Handygo, told Business Standard.
Handygo has already tied up with almost all the major telecom operators like Airtel, Uninor, Idea, Tata and Reliance to reach the rural people, and Behtar Zindagi will go live with Vodafone and BSNL in a week from now, he added.
Stating that Behtar Zindagi was designed to cover information on complete crop lifecycle, Rajpal said the company was planning to come up with a call centre in September, through which farmers could connect to agricultural scientists.
“The main objective of the investment is to ‘own’ customers for Behtar Zindagi. We currently have two million customers for this service, and we expect this base to touch 10 million by the end of this year and 15 million in the next,” he said.
Handygo is also gearing up to commercially launch ‘Fame on Game’, an exclusive gaming portal for the rural people who seek entertainment and learning at the same go. “The soft launch of Fame on Game has seen more than half-a-million subscribers with 12 minutes of average game time,“ he said.