A well-designed government scheme can still fail to reach the people it was built for, not because the scheme is flawed, but because awareness of it never travels far enough down the value chain. This is a persistent gap in rural India's policy landscape, and B2V's work on the ground offers a useful, concrete example of what closing that gap actually requires. 

The case in point 

Between February and December 2019, B2V ran an awareness program across 20 districts of Odisha for the central government's Agriculture Marketing Infrastructure scheme, working under CCS-NIAM, part of the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare. The program engaged more than 1,000 stakeholders, and critically, it did not stop at farmers. It brought in local traders, input sellers, cooperatives, Farmer Producer Organisations, bankers, and NGOs as active participants in the awareness effort. 

Why reaching the whole value chain matters 

Government schemes tied to agriculture marketing infrastructure are rarely used by farmers in isolation. A farmer's decision to engage with a scheme is shaped by what their local trader knows, whether their cooperative is set up to support it, and whether a bank is prepared to process related transactions. An awareness campaign that only informs farmers, while leaving the rest of this network uninformed, tends to see limited real-world uptake, even if awareness numbers among farmers look strong on paper. 

What this reveals about scheme design broadly 

This pattern is not unique to one scheme. Rural India's policy landscape includes many well-intentioned government schemes where uptake lags well behind eligibility, and a recurring reason is that awareness efforts are designed around a single stakeholder group rather than the full ecosystem that scheme adoption actually depends on. Closing that gap requires treating awareness as a value-chain problem, not a farmer-communication problem. 

Implications for policymakers and implementation partners 

For government officials designing rollout strategies, and for organisations implementing awareness campaigns on their behalf, this points to a clear design principle: identify every stakeholder group whose understanding or buy-in affects real-world scheme uptake, and build outreach for each of them, not just the intended beneficiary. It is a more resource-intensive approach than a single farmer-facing campaign, but it is also far more likely to translate into actual scheme usage rather than awareness that never converts to action. 

A model worth replicating 

The 20-district approach in Odisha demonstrates that multi-stakeholder awareness work is achievable at meaningful scale within a defined timeframe. For other states or schemes facing similar uptake gaps, this offers a practical template: map the full value chain first, then design outreach around it, rather than assuming that informing farmers alone will be enough to move adoption.