Acumen India Fellow Aniket Doegar was introduced to problem-solving early. In northern India’s Shimla, his mother first showed him what it meant to dedicate one’s life to solving problems of poverty through her work teaching at a local school for low-income children. His aunt followed the same set of values, in founding and running Udaan, a school in Shimla for children with special needs. This early introduction to education at the grassroots level gave him the understanding of the power of education to equip young people with the knowledge and skills required to change their own lives in the classroom and beyond. He says, “I had seen a lot of teachers change lives around me. They helped transform a generation due to the access to education that they provided, which may not have been possible without Udaan and support from the community they built beyond the school.”
A Social Entrepreneur in the Making
Studying Commerce at Shri Ram College of Commerce, Aniket would return home from college every summer to volunteer at Udaan where he helped with everyday administrative duties. It was at Udaan that Aniket learned the importance of putting the beneficiaries at the center of a model: “The kids came first,” says Aniket. “If you’re designing technology for the most marginalized people, you’re working and designing programs for everyone.” This starts with empathy — by looking at a problem from the user’s perspective and designing the solution from there.
After graduating from college, Aniket taught second graders in low-income areas in Pune as a Teach for India Fellow, served last-mile citizens in rural Maharashtra, and eventually worked with various startups across the country. No matter where he went, the challenge was the same: low-income people didn’t know about their basic rights nor the government “schemes,” or welfare benefits, they qualified for, largely because they lacked access to eligibility information. The impact of this disconnect is huge: only 40 million of approximately 125 million farmers received the full benefit of the national government’s Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana scheme due to awareness and execution issues. In Uttar Pradesh, ₹9,651 crores [$1.3 billion USD] in funds available for minority welfare remained unspent between 2013 and 2017. In Karnataka, ₹5,344 crores [$720 million USD] in worker welfare funds went unused. This is especially a problem in a country where over 90 percent of the workforce is employed as “informal workers,” or temporary laborers making low wages without benefits such as healthcare, a pension or sick leave. How could the government’s welfare benefits be effective in reducing poverty if qualifying citizens didn’t even know about them? No private platform existed to provide citizens with access to this information. Aniket saw a gap that needed to be filled: “I started to think about how we can have this information and all the documents delivered across all schemes to the citizens,” Aniket says. With his belief in education and knowledge as tools of empowerment, Aniket set out to find a way to deliver these benefits at a national scale.
In early 2014, he founded Hands for You Foundation, a nonprofit designed to make government welfare benefits information accessible to citizens across the country. He then partnered with Asha Krishnan and P R Ganapathy, two social entrepreneurs in his network to transform the nonprofit into a social enterprise called Haqdarshak. The decision to set up Haqdarshak as a for-profit organization stemmed from Aniket’s vision to maximize the company’s impact: “To help us scale, we went with the for-profit model and made sure that our focus was still on ensuring impact.”
Connecting Indian Citizens to Welfare Benefits
As he learned early on from Udaan, Aniket put his intended users first, designing Haqdarshak’s approach based on their needs. Drawing on his understanding of the impact of education, he built Haqdarshak with the intention of informing last-mile citizens of their benefit eligibility. These values are embedded in Haqdarshak’s name: Haq means rights in Urdu, and Darshak means the individual or entity that shows you the path in Hindi.
The social enterprise hires local rural women, called Haqdarshaks in 19 out of 29 states and seven union territories across India to show their communities this path to information about government welfare benefits and their eligibility using the company’s mobile platform equipped with information in local languages for all states. Using their own smartphones, the Haqdarshaks first provide a free eligibility screening for people in their community and then offer support applying for welfare benefits such as government funding for girls’ education for a nominal fee. To reach more last-mile citizens, Haqdarshaks also travel to rural villages outside their own communities to inform citizens about new government schemes and welfare benefits for which they may qualify.
Many of the Haqdarshaks had minimal primary education up to the 6–8th grade level and were either previously unemployed or working in low-wage agricultural roles. With Haqdarshak, each woman is able to earn ₹2,000–3,000 [$35 USD] per month, bringing in additional income for their households where men are typically the sole breadwinners.
Beyond one-on-one services, Haqdarshak also partners with large companies, governments, and most recently, micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) to reach more qualifying citizens — helping corporations like Godrej Properties enable their informal workers to access welfare benefits or incorporating their information on state governments’ local platforms.
Building Bridges with the Acumen India Fellowship
In 2018, Aniket applied for the Acumen India Fellowship — offering social change agents the tools, leadership training and space to innovate new ideas, accelerate their impact and build a strong network of like-minded entrepreneurs — to work on making Haqdarshak’s business model profitable while maintaining its impact mission. Through Acumen, Aniket met Padam Kumar Jain, another Acumen India Fellow who helped Haqdarshak build its partnerships with agricultural organizations to connect their partner farmers to benefits. For Aniket, the Acumen India Fellowship also reinforced the importance of integrity in the work of social change: “Moral leadership for me is defining what you stand for, or what your organization stands for, and sticking by it, no matter the circumstances.”
Consequently, Haqdarshak’s model has not wavered from its focus on designing for the end user — and it’s working. So far, the company’s 5,000 Haqdarshaks have screened applications from over 300,000 citizens and connected more than 250,000 of those citizens to government welfare benefits. And they’re just getting started: in the last year, Haqdarshak has gone from processing 500 to 36,000 applications a month.
While Haqdarshak was continuing to prove the sustainability of its model, Acumen India was busy refining its workforce development investment strategy. Noting the fundamental value of Haqdarshak’s services in enabling livelihoods for informal workers, Acumen invested in Haqdarshak’s pre-Series A round this year — marking the first Acumen India investee founded by an Acumen Fellow.
Haqdarshak’s services have only become more urgent in the midst of COVID-19 as the company rushes to connect citizens to new government welfare benefits addressing the hardships of COVID-19. During India’s COVID-19 lockdown, Haqdarshak has facilitated over 60,000 applications and launched a multilingual app to help citizens in every state use their own smartphones to find and apply for government benefits directly. On-ground, Haqdarshak’s new multilingual helpline is supporting informal workers now unemployed under lockdown with everything from applications for welfare benefits to connecting families to the closest food ration provider. The urgency of COVID-19 has only increased Haqdarshak’s commitment to putting the user first as Aniket and his team tirelessly build new platforms to meet their citizens’ new needs.
Despite the sleepless nights, Aniket is more determined than ever to connect even more of India’s low-income citizens with benefits, with a goal of reaching 100 million people by 2030: “The money that the government collects from taxes belongs to the citizens, and I want to see that ₹9 lakh crore [$120 billion USD] be invested in our people because it belongs to our people. I’d like to see a more logical, rational, and engaging India — at least from the policy side of things — that is able to invest in its people in the right way with our existing resources. I’d like to see a country that is inclusive in all areas, not one that is purely driven by the next big opportunity.” With his customer-centric values and integrity rooted in grit, Aniket is driving India towards achieving this vision, one Haqdarshak at a time.
Applications for the Acumen Fellowships in Colombia, India and Spain open on September 16th, 2020. Learn more here.
