Bartronics sees Rs600 cr financial inclusion revenues in 3 years

Bartronics, the automatic identification and data capture (AIDC) company, is pinning hopes on the emerging opportunities in the financial inclusion space for catapulting its turnover.

The company is said to be currently sitting on an opportunity worth about Rs600 crore that can be monetised over a period of about three years.

“We have already bagged about 30 projects in the financial inclusion space covering about 60,000 villages. We are at an advanced stage of getting another 15-20 such projects. Aftwer finalising these projects, the total number of villages would go up to one lakh. This is a major opportunity for the company,” Sudhir Rao, Bartronics MD, told DNA.

Bartronics had similar hopes on a citizen services project, which involved setting up of about 2,000 kiosks in the National Capital Region for offering citizen services on a transaction fee model.

The company was expecting a revenue of about Rs500 crore from this activity. However, the project - called Aap Ke Dwar - is currently caught in legal issues, with Bartronics seeking arbitration through the Delhi High Court to find an amicable solution.

“The citizen services project is on hold due to certain issues related to approvals. We have already erected about 300 kiosks but they are not contributing any revenue. However, further expansion is not happening and the matter has been referred to arbitration,” Rao said.

Bartronics has invested about Rs42 crore on infrastructure for the kiosks that are up and running and about Rs140 crore is stuck in the form of advances. “Most of the investment is retrievable,” he said.
However, the inclusion project is said to be more certain due to the agreements with the banks and also obligation of the banks to meet the financial inclusion targets.

The company works on a combination of fixed income and variable portion in the project.

“We get a fixed fee for enrolment of beneficiaries. Additionally, we get a fee based on the transactions carried out by the beneficiaries using the smart cards issued by us. We are expecting revenue of about Rs1 lakh per village, and with the 60,000 villages we have on hand we should get about Rs600 crore. We are expecting this revenue over a period of about three years. But we have not factored in this revenue while offering revenue projections,” he said.

The firm would outsource the hardware portion to a vendor while the software component including the smart card to be given the account holders would be handled by Bartronics.