Transforming Bharat's finance landscape: The RUGR story

Time of India

15-07-2025

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India's financial revolution has been predominantly urban. That said, fintech is finding its way into the hinterland, one village at a time. And one name, RUGR, is at the forefront of this transformation.RUGR is not just another app in the sea of fintech products. Instead, it is an infrastructure-level power and digital catalyst designed for Bharat — the India that dwells in towns, panchayats, mandis, and farming belts. The appeal of RUGR lies in its philosophy of building bridges instead of just breaking down walls. It does not want to replace traditional banks or NBFCs, but work alongside them with modular, scalable tech to help these institutions serve the underserved better. In essence, RUGR is not here to compete; it is here to complete.RUGR is not about branding. It is about implementation and the intertwining of state-of-the-art fintech solutions with India's rural and semi-urban financial setting. With the deployment of an extremely advanced set of modules called "Grams," RUGR gives a digital facelift to legacy institutions such as cooperative banks, NBFCs, and Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACS) — quickly and affordably, with none of the red tape and heavy overhead costs of building their own tech from scratch.At the core is Fin-Gram, a custom-built Core Banking System (CBS) for cooperative banks and credit societies. It automates and streamlines loan disbursement, deposit mobilisation, interest tracking, and security-related approvals. Unlike conventional CBSs, Fin-Gram is designed to be rural-scale, cost-efficient, and corresponding to agricultural cycles.Agri-Gram fuses data science with agriculture, with features such as real-time warehousing analytics, crop inventory, and input finance for transparent supply chains and a price discovery module that recognises farmers as value chain members rather than just credit seekers.RUGR Garuda is more than connected banking, in that it provides efficient one-to-many payouts, including B2B vendor payments, gig worker payouts, insurance refunds, commissions, fees, and government transfers in a single, secure, compliant model. RUGR Garuda is built for scale and offers sponsorship-model pay-ins and pay-outs with full traceability. It is not simply a payment rail; it is an app-based neo-banking experience with all the features of account opening, KYC, and digital banking.Transfer-Gram lets institutions execute high-volume, error-free payouts for government subsidies, wages, B2B commissions, refunds, NGO payouts, or company wage disbursements. With a secure and compliant infrastructure, Transfer-Gram is tailor-made for one-to-many disbursements at scale.Paperwork is one of the biggest hurdles in rural banking. Neo-Gram cuts through paperwork with biometric KYC, video onboarding, and Aadhaar verification, offering a full-stack neo-banking experience, from account creation to wallet integration.It offers fraud detection, POS support, insurance plug, and risk alerts. Operating on a sponsorship model for pay-ins and pay-outs — like a model such as Issuer X — even a remote PACS can act as a modern bank without having to invest in heavy IT infrastructure.RUGR Garuda is RUGR's in-house FRM and transaction backbone, providing a secure and scalable mechanism for payouts across Bharat. Garuda enables real-time disbursements across a variety of use cases, from gig worker wages to B2B vendor payments and refunds, all while ensuring compliance and combining KYC, account creation, and transaction monitoring for a 'banking-in-an-app" experience. It also has an industry-leading detection speed of under 60 seconds and an industry-best dispute ratio, offering trust and simplicity to rural finance.RUGR's genius lies in its empathy-based human-centric design. Options for regional languages, user-friendly interfaces, and even offline digital functionality makes for natural adoption, not forced adoption. Importantly, RUGR speaks the language of Bharat, not just in form, but function. It connects with the sabziwala who has a feature phone, the teacher who is applying for a micro loan, and the bank clerk who manages paper-based records.Echoing RUGR's mission-driven ethos, Arangasamy KV captures the brand's deeper vision with clarity:"Technology is only meaningful when it bends towards purpose. RUGR's purpose is not convenience alone, but change that is deep, inclusive, and enduring."— Arangasamy KV, Founder, RUGRToday, there is still a staggering 65% of India that lives in villages, Yet less than 20% of that population enjoys a strong digital banking experience. This gap is a lost opportunity. The arrival of RUGR is a turning point, marking the beginning of a new era for India's fintech development that is horizontal, not vertical. It recognises that aspiration isn't created in a lab in fintech accelerators, but in the barns, bazaars, and gram sabhas of rural India A significant step in this direction was established when Hrithik Roshan was signed on as the new face of RUGR, bringing not only credibility, but a cultural relevance that allows the platform to connect with hearts before connecting to devices.The future of finance in India lies not only in billion-dollar IPOs or global partnerships. It is also in a QR code being tapped at a village ration shop. It is farmers checking their loan balance in real-time. It is about teachers receiving their salary on time through a secure app.With RUGR, rural India is not catching up; it is at the forefront of India's economic revolution