IMImobile today announced the launch of its new VAS service named ‘Cell Shakti’. ‘Cell Shakti’ is a voice based service aimed only for rural subscribers. It intends to provide rural subscribers with information like Weather Info, Health Care, Mandi Bhav, Educational Info and Information on Basic Law and Order.
The details of the service that have been released are that Airtel Subscribers can call 52345006 to subscribe to Cell Shakti and will be charged Re 1 per day for the service. User can also listen to the live updates in Telugu. IMI Mobile has refused to disclose the names of its content partners, saying only that the content is from reliable sources.
The company has released this service keeping in mind that the rural market in India has an enormous potential and largely remains untapped. 70 percent of India’s population lives in the rural areas while 64 percent of the nation’s expenditure and 56 percent of its income comes from the villages. Yet the rural tele-density stands only at 13 percent and therefore is expected to grow phenomenally.
The service has been designed as a voice based one due to the fact that literacy levels in the villages are very low and hence even SMS will not be sufficient to reach out to everyone. “Through our rural initiative we are in the plans to roll-out various other segmented services very soon”, said Madhavan Iyer, Vice President Managed Services of IMImobile, speaking on the launch of Cell Shakti.
