NCoRe is a joint initiative of Social Informatics Research Group of Indian Institute of Management Calcutta and Heritage Institute of Technology Kolkata and funded by SEED division of Department of Science & Technology, Govt of India.

NCoRe is an experimental e-connecting and e-supporting platform, which attempts to directly connects rural artisans of Birbhum with urban consumers and micro-entrepreneurs to collaborate and co-create handcrafted products. Each rural producer holds an individual digital shop in NCoRe comprising of their profile and photos of their products. Individual profile of rural artisans consists of a brief video depicting the surrounding and conditions in which the artist produces and a short story narrating the artistic experience of each artist. In short, NCoRe narrates the artistic journey of both handmade products and artisans, which enables our digital platform to transcend beyond e-commerce.

NCoRe has a tripartite division of the services it offers. Not only does it enable direct selling of handmade goods, it also enables buyers to customize their handicraft products by collaborating with the rural artisans. Collaborative production triggers purposive exchange between buyers and sellers during the course of production, thereby building an organic bond between the two. By virtue of this organic bond, neither the seller nor the buyer is alienated from the produced goods. The provision of collaborative production further contributes in transcending NCoRe beyond e-commerce, where the latter solely serves a commercial purpose by mechanically matching demand with supply.

NCoRe also has the provision of upskilling incorporated within its domain. NCoRe platform hosts a training module, which offers both urban and rural users provision to master a variety of indigenous art forms, either by accessing the repository of training videos uploaded in NCoRe or by requesting a trainer. In this context, domain experts offering the training as trainers can be both from urban or rural context. Thus, NCoRe attempts in triggering a two-way exchange between rural and urban India, where rural handicraft artists can also act as trainers, thereby negating the assumption that it is only the urban world which has to offer in overall developmental context. The broad and empowering paradigm of NCoRe, as is explicit from the above discussion, urge us to identify NCoRe as a platform transcending the limited parameter and scope of e-commerce sites.