New Delhi, May 5 2016: Hyderabad based technology startup,  NowFloats,   has brought out  a book which checks out the real impact of Digital India in the rural hinterland.
In just under 20 days, four crew members of the ‘Digital Desh Drive 2’ travelled more than 4000 km in a car through the business hubs in 18 cities, towns and villages of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi NCR to get a pulse of the ‘real superpower’ of Digital India and unravel more than 40 stories of how the Tier 2, 3 and even 4 cities are using technology in their everyday life. The initiative is sponsored by Google India, IAMAI, iSPIRT, Paytm and AskMe.  This is the second such drive.
Woven in a storytelling narrative, Digital Desh 2.0 shares insights on the real Indian entrepreneurs from the gullies and bazaars of rural India. For example:

• In Pushkar, Rajasthan, Pawan now owns 400 camels of his own instead of working for other safari operators, primarily because of the power of the internet. Indore-based hotel & bakery owner Saurabh uses apps on his smartphone for everything business-related, from CCTV surveillance to coordinating with his team.
• In Akola village, a B.Com dropout Bhagwati Lal Chhipa has used WhatsApp to reduce his order communication time from 15 days to just a few hours. In village Mandu of Dhar district in Madhya Pradesh, where internet is barely available, AK Jain, a 52-year old government school principal has deployed a GPS-based e-attendance system for teachers and manages pay-slips through a mobile app.
• In Guda Bishnoi village in Jodhpur, digital helped Deepak and Dhanraj to bypass the middlemen, and sell antique jeeps, pups and Marwari horses on a popular online portal and even promote their antique jeep village safaris themselves on TripAdvisor and the Lonely Planet.
• In Hathipole Market, a 30-year old paan shop owner Pradeep is already on to his 88thsmartphone.

The book --  Digital Desh –‘Inside the Internet of India’ -- was launched by Minister for Communications & IT, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Hon’ble Government of India along with. Jasminder Singh Gulati, Co-founder, NowFloats;  Chetan Krishnaswamy, Country Head - Public Policy, Google India;  Sharad Sharma, Co-Founder, iSPIRT; Dr. Subho Ray, President, Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI); Manav Sethi, Group CMO, AskMe, India & Malaysia; and  Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder, Paytm.
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Find the  47 page Digital Desh book v.2  in PDF here
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 In May 2015, the  first Digital Desh Drive,  from Amritsar to Kanyakumari covering 7500km in 24 cities in 24 days, found that SMBs from Tier III cities (89%) had the highest adoption of smart devices for customer interaction as compared to Tier I (73%) and Tier II Cities (78%). SMBs in the healthcare industry had the highest adoption of PCs across all cities, though the manufacturing units leveraged the PC technology the most. Digital helped reduce distance barrier for healthcare delivery, achieve supply chain efficiencies in manufacturing & retail, achieve 20x ROI in hospitality, and increase top line by 2x for wholesale SMBs using ecommerce among the respondents.
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Find the book of the first Digital  Desh Drive
from Amritsar to Kanya Kumari   here
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 Digital Desh Drive (an initiative of NowFloats) aims to unravel exactly how the Tier 2, 3 and even 4 cities are using technology in their everyday life. This is an anti-survey of sorts because it is a quest to document the real stories