Thesis: Government schemes are being launched at the drop of a hat. The Centre and the state governments plan their financial budgets around social welfare and other schemes. Political parties enshrine them in their manifestos, and elections are won or lost on the success or failure of these welfare measures. A post-poll study study The Hindu The methodology for the CSDS-Lokniti post-election survey in Gujarat Read more by Lokniti, a research programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, concludes that welfare schemes brought the Bharatiya Janata Party its seventh consecutive win in Gujarat in December. It’s believed that with five state elections in 2023, we’ll see a lot more of such schemes, especially from the central government.
Counterthesis: Six-year-old startup Haqdarshak, which has served 3 million families on the government schemes, says India needs only a fraction of these programmes. An average family avails 55 of them, says its founder Aniket Doegar. Haqdarshak—which means a guide to one’s rights, powers, and privileges—assists more than 100 companies, including the Tatas, Jindal, Godrej, Amazon, Uber, and Urban Company, in getting government schemes to their workers.
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“There’s no one place where all the schemes are curated”
There are 13,000 direct-benefit transfer (DBT) schemes listed with the Reserve Bank of India. Most of these are notified by the Centre while some by the states. Over and above this, there are at least 10,000 more that are not DBT. So, we are looking at a universe of 20,000-25,000 schemes.
Now, more and more welfare programmes are going to the DBT channel.
Government schemes impact 900 million out of 1.4 billion people and 55 million micro businesses of the 62 million in the country.
Financially, their budget is about Rs 20 lakh crore (~US$241 billion). Budgeting in India happens in a way that about 8-9% of our overall GDP is factored for social security, including farm loans. And this pie will only grow as our GDP grows.
South India has been a pioneer in this respect. Today, YS Jagan Mohan Reddy’s [chief minister of Andhra Pradesh] whole budgeting is around government schemes; he doesn’t do anything else.
At Haqdarshak, our approach is to get information to the people and see what they are eligible for. We’ve seen that they often avail just two to three government schemes even though they are eligible for 40-60 of them. Usually, people know what they want—either their pension is stuck, insurance money hasn’t arrived, or the cooking-gas installment is pending. We first solve their problem and then get them to newer schemes.
Ours is a simple rules engine platform. The technology is built on rules because the government has eligibility criteria.
