While close to 62 per cent of India's 1.3 billion population lives in villages, agriculture contributes to only about 15 per cent of India's gross development product (GDP) (Plecher 2020). Even though a significant part of the rural workforce is involved in non-agricultural activities, such as services and trading, rural India is unable to generate adequate employment opportunities for its workforce, resulting in high rates of unemployment as well as disguised unemployment. Any such adverse statistics are more unfavourable for the female population than the male. For example, while the employment-to-population ratio for rural male was 51.7 per cent in 2018, it was a mere 14.2 per cent for women. This results in large-scale migration of the youth from villages to cities in search of jobs. Given the conservative nature of India's villages, it is very unlikely that parents of young women would allow their daughters to go to cities on their own in search of jobs. Therefore, while educated men from Indian villages often have the option to migrate, educated women can only search for employment opportunities within their villages until they get married. Their inability to find suitable livelihood opportunities not only acts as a dampener for parents to educate their girl child but also perpetuates the idea that the only responsibility of the parents of girl child is to get her prepared for marriage, which, therefore, should be conducted as early as possible.

With a total revenue of USD 28 billion, India has a thriving business process outsourcing (BPO)3 industry that employs about 1.1 million people (Talgeri and Singh 2018). Almost all such BPO organizations are located in big cities, such as Bengaluru, Gurugram or Pune. Apart from the ready availability of English-speaking educated youth, these cities provide the suitable physical infrastructure that is essential for running such a business.

RuralShores is a BPO organization that wanted to change this urban-centric model and set up operations in rural India. It intended to create employment opportunities for the rural youth close to their villages to prevent their migration to cities. It was established in 2008 and three years later, it operated 10 centres across seven India states and provided employment to over 1,000 rural youth. The following sections describe how it established its business, the impact that it created and the challenges that it confronted on its way.