The other day I came across one of the eBay’s business units, Kijiji and it has launched in India. It is an online classifieds Web site that focused solely in India. On the Web site, you can find the variety of community services, commercial products, real estate, jobs, events, and etc.

One special subdomain in the Kijiji India is its rural marketplace. It is a special classifieds listing that available in local Indian languages, i.e. Hindi and Tamil. I found this is particularly special because of the social responsibility commitment showed by eBay’s Kijiji in India. This rural marketplace is emerged as the platform targeted at the rural population of India with an aim to help people in villages improve their economic livelihood. Kijiji India has a vision that with this platform, it would eventually enabled the rural populace to trade goods, look for jobs, market their local produce, find and exchange information on services within their village or district.

This is not the first time a big corporation that committed to help the rural people in India. Another computing giant, Intel has launched the ‘Community PC’ for the rural India in March this year. I like these community involvement carried out by eBay’s Kijiji and Intel. This is the opportunity must be fully utilized in order to bridge the rural-urban divide, using platform or free PC as the tools in this case. In the end, the objectives for these two community involvement will still the same, i.e. to empower the rural India.

On the other hand, I believed we also should not over applaud the social responsibility commitment of the big corporation in the market. This is because the reasons for companies becoming interested in social responsibility are diverse. Some doing it simply because they want to gain market positioning. One of the famous article written by the late Milton Friedman , i.e. ‘The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits‘ dates from 1970 provided the great insights on this issue. There is not necessary to conclude that social responsibility must be analogous to sacrifice, it may be a holistic approach to yield greater returns in the long run. In this case, Kijiji India’s community involvement may well served as a market entry strategy that going to attract a huge audience in India, thus establish itself a leadership amongst the existing players such as Vargikrit , Local Indya, India Yellow Pages, and etc.

Overall, I must say I like the idea of rural marketplace launched by eBay’s Kijiji India. I believed it will succeed in India, especially this is not done on an occasional basis, but strongly tied to its overall business strategy in India.