On a mission to impact 100 million citizens who deserve access to information

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In brief:

• A young and aspiring Aniket committed himself to his startup after volunteering on the grounds in rural villages in India, despite having dreams of furthering his studies overseas.

• He recognised the lack of access that households in lower-income groups had to information for government benefits and other welfare schemes.

• He set up his tech platform Haqdarshak to solve that problem, also building a network of women entrepreneurs to help fulfil the last-mile requirements for customers. 

• A key learning in his journey was to not see those from low-income backgrounds as beneficiaries, but as quality customers who were also hungry and willing to pay for quality services.

• Aniket’s advice to entrepreneurs is to be completely married to the problem but be flexible with the solution so that you can pivot at any time and change with circumstances.

Anne: Today on The Next Impact Maker, we speak to a young founder from India who realised that millions of its citizens were not getting access to government welfare programs meant for them. Simply because they did not even know about those programs. His company aims to change that. 

Today, we have Aniket Doegar, co-founder and CEO of Haqdarshak. Welcome in Aniket. 

Aniket: Thank you again. 

Anne: Before we talk about what Haqdarshak does, I would like to talk about the issue that it is trying to solve. Could you tell us about the moment you discovered this problem? 

Aniket:  I first started teaching in a low-income government school in Pune in a Teach for India initiative, which is based on the Teach for America programme. I taught grade two students, 75 of them, and today 68 of them are in college, which I still consider my biggest achievement. 

Back then I was doing all of this to build my résumé so that I could go to Harvard or Oxford and study. But that experience as a 21-year-old, opened my world view on the fact that there are these millions of people who do not have access to information, basic social security, and/or basic services. 

That is how my initial interest started - what can be done there? I was about 22 or 23 years old when I started working within the communities to understand what the gap is. And I remember talking to one of the parents of my students, and I asked them, “Do you know about this government program where you can get pension? Government puts money in your account”. And they said, “Absolutely not, we do not even have these in documents.”

This was about ten years back when India had about 20% internet penetration. Smartphones were not being used as much. 2G also did not work well. And so, it was a time when you would just log on to a computer and just barely Google or Wikipedia things. That is when I concluded that we needed to start something where information can be democratised.

Anne: That parent that you were speaking to, what does it mean for them when they say that they do not even have documents? How are they living their lives? 

Aniket: In India's largest metro cities like Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore - there is a lot of internal migration. As a country, we have one of the largest internal migrations because of our population. Today we are 1.4 billion people. Almost half of them come to urban cities as workers. 

This parent that I am talking about was a construction worker who used to work on construction sites and lived with ten people lived in a two-room house in a slum at Pune. So, for them, even getting that basic information or documents that shows that they a residents of the city is a big challenge. Apart from the government benefits just the personal dignity and acknowledgment and the sense of pride (to have those documents). 

Anne: It's interesting because you went to Teach for India to educate some kids, but you ended up caring for their parents more. Do you remember how you felt when you heard their story about how they don't even have documentation? 

Aniket: Firstly, shocked. Because I took some of these things for granted. And again, this is coming from a 21, 22 year-old who saw this and felt that this is something basic. 

And then I started peeling the layers off it - in terms of income and privilege. In India, there is a huge disparity in caste and the diversity that exists. All of those things combined,

But there was also a sense of possibility because I did not know the structures well, so I did not know how hard it would be to do this. I just felt that it would be simple. I have access to a laptop, and I know Google. I can Google everything and figure it out. Why should it be difficult? But then of course, as you start doing this, you realise how difficult it is to get access to these services. 

Anne: What happened when they told you all this? Did you try to help them in the end to figure out what they are eligible for?

Aniket: Innately, I have a huge bias to action, which sometimes works, and sometimes works negatively. My first reaction was, to go out and talk to the local elected representative and to get the parents the benefits. But I wasn’t able to get them the benefits.

But that's what created a lot more thoughts in my mind – like why didn't it happen? Why is it so difficult? 

So that notion kind of lingered on, even though immediately after that I did a few things across India for experience, but this initial thought of why I couldn't get parents of my students access to basic services, even though it's free from the government or in a sense, it's a constitutional divide, like, why is that happening? That kind of remained with me. 

Anne: It’s also because you're coming from a perspective of, you know how to use the technology and for you it's tough. So, imagine how much more difficult it must have been for them. In a sense then Haqdarshak comes in, right? How are you intending to shake things up? How are you intending to change everything?

Aniket: The next couple of years after Teach for India I was exploring. I was fortunate to work with a couple of great mentors who gave me good leadership positions at a young age. I worked across the country, with corporations in New Delhi, and in rural areas, so I'm constantly everywhere. 

I largely work with the low-income communities, and realised that this is a pan-India phenomenon. I have now come to the conclusion that it's a global phenomenon where people do not have access to information and information is power. 

With that thought, I initially started an open-source nonprofit platform because I had no intention of building an organisation or even being in India. However, I had the full intention of doing the project, having a great resumé and leaving India to do my fancy masters elsewhere. So that's how the thought started. 

Then, I failed miserably in scaling up the non-profit platform, because while we were able to prove that such a technology works, we couldn't get any business model going. The learning from that failure is that if you want to make impact at scale, there needs to be a really sustainable model. 

That's where I got to know more about the social enterprise model, where you could be a for profit company but still focus on impact. And that's how in 2015 we started Haqdarshak. 

Anne: Why do you think the previous version failed? 

Aniket: There were two or three things that I innately was very clear on at a very young age, which is that I wanted to only get into this if I was able to solve the problem. And I was also clear that I wanted to use technology because technology enables scale and I want to work on a problem which I can solve in my lifetime. I don't want to build an organisation for the sake of it. 

Those are some of the things that I felt we were not able to get clarity in the previous solution. It was also the support of mentors and co-founders along the way. Haqdarshak started with initial investments from a social analyst, and I think he guided a lot in terms of how the enterprise model works. 

Also, the other thing that worked back then in 2015-16, the Indian government really pushed the policy of Startup India where they supported all startups. 

There was a lot that you could do if you had an idea. There was a lot of inertia and focus on guiding young people towards innovation and getting them that capital access, which worked really well for us and gave us that initial freedom to fail.

Anne: You mentioned earlier that you had this master plan to eventually go overseas. I understand it's been maybe 8 to 10 years now and you're still in India. You didn't achieve that dream. But what was the turning point for you to be like, “I am going to start my own business and I'm going to handle this myself”. 

Aniket: In the initial two years, I went to every organisation out there and said, “I'm happy to work for you for some time.  Would you want to do this with me?” And when I realised nobody was really keen in doing this, that's when I decided that I should do this.

Once I committed to it, I said, I am not going to budge for 10 years. Come what may, failure or success. I will give the next 10 years of my life to this and see where I can take this organisation. So that was kind of the personal commitment that I made, back then in 2015. 

Anne: So now we can go into what Haqdarshak does. What does Haqdarshak do? 

Aniket: 

Essentially, it's an organisation which shows you the path towards your rights. That is what Haqdarshak means. 

Essentially, it is a technology platform. You put in your information, and it automatically tells you what are the government programs that you are eligible for. At the back end, the core IP that we have built is this repository of government schemes and loans because each government scheme eligibility works like a probability theory - if and or conditions. 

If you belong to this caste, income or region, you will get a program. We qualified, simplified and we digitised 7000 plus programs in 10 plus local languages. That was the first task in the first year. Then we built it into a simple mobile platform.

The third thing that we did is not assume that the end citizen will download this because some of them do not own smartphones and/or have access to the internet. The whole model is based on assistive technology. 

In 2017, we started pivoting the models so we now train local women largely as agents, as entrepreneurs who use our mobile platform and go door to door. 

So if I’m an agent located in the same village (as those in need), I’ll ask them a set of 20 to 40 questions. The platform will automatically say you are eligible for 40 government programmes or 50 government programmes, these financial programs, then I will also help you apply for them. In terms of form filling, uploading the documents so that your entire process is done. For this process I’ll charge you a small fee. 

Our business model largely is that we work with corporate partners and foundations - and DBS is one of our biggest partners. We also do have over a hundred other partners in India.

Of course, this now seems very simplified, but along the way we've pivoted about 20 times and multiple programs have supported us. One of the first programs we did was the DBS NUS Challenge, which we won in 2017. We never set out (to create this), which seems like a very good business model today after seven years. Every year, we used to test out five things. For of which would fail, and one we would pick up and say, “Well, this works. Let's move on to the next.” And it continues even today. 

Anne: This is such a seamless business model. It's so comprehensive. How did you get to this point? What are some of those learnings and what were some of the initial failures that made you pivot? 

Aniket: When we first started, we never wanted to have a field team. We wanted to build a product SAAS platform. So we said, we'll qualify these schemes, we'll have our technology team and we will give it out to all the companies and agents and non-profits in the country. 

And then we found out that nobody wanted to take it because people were asking, “Why should we do this?”

Customer acquisition was high. So that was the first pivot – when we realised that it makes sense for us to build our own network. So the first real pivot was to go out on the ground and start training women and identifying women.  

At first we never thought it should only have women entrepreneurs – that’s where the second pivot happened. When we started doing some field studies in 2017 and 

Anne: How did you find this out? 

Aniket: As a male, because of patriarchy, you have the ability to travel. If I'm a male in a rural household, I can travel to any district. I could travel 50 kilometres out for a construction site or a factory tomorrow. However, if I'm a woman, I will not be allowed to go outside of my village. 

We picked that up as an advantage because if we had trained male entrepreneurs, two months down the line they can leave us for a better job. Whereas with women, if we focus and invest in their training, they are actually area literate, and then get financially literate. They will get more money and they will remain within their villages, which is something they wanted. 

They wanted work, but their problem was that they didn't want to travel very far as they're also the primary workers at home. 

So it's not like they were not working. They may not be working for someone else, but they are also doing so much work in the house. And they were also the primary workers in the farms. So that’s what we started building on that and said this was a great model. 

India has something called self-help groups for women, which are the largest female groups at over a million groups, which basically work on microfinance. We targeted those groups since some of them were already doing similar work, why not train them? And that's when we shifted to women entrepreneurship. 

Anne: And what do these women do? What do you train them to do? 

Aniket: They are the ones who go door-to-door, they tell people about government schemes, profile and eligibility – and end-to-end help these citizens get access to government schemes and documents. They are like our end-to-end agent. 

We don't expect the citizens and these rural or urban low-income families to download our app. It's the agents who download it and do the last mile application. 

Anne: You also mentioned that you never sought out to do field work, but it sounds like, you know so intricately all the issues that are happening on the ground. Any learnings that you've come across during this time at field work?

Aniket:

Access to information is crucial for everything, not just government social security. And sometimes when you are on the ground, you realise how little information people have. 

In today's day and age, where internet access has increased to 4G and 5G, and India has about 900 million smartphone users (still half a billion to go, but huge numbers) there is still misinformation. And how much citizens value good information. That was one learning.

Secondly, the notion that people who come from low-income backgrounds cannot pay for a high quality service, is not true. If there is a quality service, if you can get food delivered to your home, or a good quality taxi ride, you will pay. 

Similarly, if a rural, low-income citizen gets a high-quality service where you are valued as a good customer, they will pay. Rather than thinking of them as some sort of beneficiaries or that you are doing something for them, my learning is that we need to treat all of them like quality customers. 

If you can treat them as customers just like you treat any corporate entity and you start really valuing the quality service, grievance, after sales service, then citizens really value that service. 

Another thing is that generating a livelihood and income is the most important thing. Nobody will do something on the ground simply because it's good. It's good so they will join you, but ultimately it needs to generate livelihoods for them. If I am as a woman entrepreneur in the sun putting in four hours a day, I need to make enough income to be able to justify that work. 

Anne: Any stories from the women that stand out to you?

Aniket: Last year, one of our partners, Acumen, had come down for a visit in one of the villages, which is to two hours from Bombay. She’d been working there for five years. I mean, I have a centre there as well. It was raining, it was monsoon, it was pouring in India, as you would know when it pours it really rains, so it was one of those days. 

She’s an American and she had a group of 20 young women who work for Haqdarshak. And she asked, what does dignity mean for you? Someone in the team translated it in the local language Marathi, like, what does this mean? 

One 19-year-old young girl raised her hand, stood up and narrated this story of how she got a family health insurance and life insurance coverage under the government program a year back. And unfortunately, due to COVID, this person's wife passed away. And she remembered that, you know, she had got them this program. 

So, she went to that person and said that you are eligible for 200,000 Indian rupees from the government as a life insurance cover, and I'll help you get it. She helped them get the money and the money came into their account. 

That person comes round to our agent after the weekend and says “Here’s 5,000 rupees.” And she said, “Why?” They said “This is the normal rat, right? You got me money and as a kickback or a cut I’ll pay you.” 

And that left every one of us stunned. Our Haqdarshaks today support over 100,000 families a month, and on a daily basis we are supporting over 3000 to 4000 families – getting them access to these benefits. That really stands out for me as you know, the power of the model. 

Anne: That's amazing and honestly, some people, when they think about these problems that the government schemes are not reaching the people. People usually think that shouldn't that be kind of a government issue? Do you see yourself as doing the government's work? 

Aniket: I personally believe that it's the government's job to design the policy, implement the rules, providing those guardrails in banking, education, and health care. But the idea is that in large countrie, such as India, I mean, it might be different in other countries, but especially in India, the realisation is that every citizen needs quality service, and also there is a huge goal for public and private partnership to come together. 

It is the private players who really bring the technology scale and last mile quality service and it is competition. You will not be able to get the best price for the customer. 

It's only by scale, numbers, and proving over the years that has brought us (to where we are) now. We have some government entities coming to us and saying, “Why don't you do this for us?”

It takes time. To give you another example, in India, for people like me who would come in the top 10% of people who have access and privilege, there are two or three services where we get high quality service, namely: passport service, visa service, and tax service. 

These are all managed by Indian companies like Tata, Infosys. The government doesn't manage these services. Whereas, the person at the last mile in the villages, villages managed by the government sometimes, there are quality service issues. 

Why not give the same passport/visa quality service to someone who's in a village in India? And say if you want your access to pension or insurance, we will provide high quality service. So that’s what we believe in Haqdarshak. 

Our vision really is, by 2030, to reach 100 million such customers across the country.

Anne: Why do you think such a gap existed in the first place? 

Aniket: In the context of India, which is true for many Asian countries, we are a very young democracy. We are not like Europe or America where we are 2-300 years old. We are far from perfect democracies, but we are learning. 

We were a British colony till 1947. I mean, there were huge literacy gaps, there were huge gaps. And I think unfortunately for us in India, we just converted the same colonial thinking for the first 30, 40 years where the people who had access continued to have access, and those who didn’t (still don’t).

As our education has increased over the last 30, 40 years, as access to basic amenities like electricity, drinking water and sanitation, which are basic things, we are moving towards a place where in the next five to ten years, we might have 100% housing. 

So as these things improve the gaps will reduce further because people will start demanding for their other rights. With information, internet and democratising this will happen. 

Largely the gap was because very few had all the power of information. 

Once you have information, you can create solutions. But for a large population that remains under the influence of a singular kind of information or doesn't have full information, it's always difficult. 

Anne: What's the big dream for Haqdarshak beyond the 3 million number? 

Aniket: We've just launched a product called Yojana card. Yojana in English means schemes or programmes. It's a first of its kind, social security and financial inclusion card. A worker or a family or a farmer will be able to get their combined social security and financial benefits like savings, loans, insurance through that card. 

Our goal is to get people access to government social security and financial inclusion in the next seven to 10 years at a scale of 100 million plus families so that they do not fall back into poverty. 

While we have done a fantastic job as a country, and we should not discount this, that in the last 20 years we have got half a billion people out of poverty, which is huge, But 86% of India still earns only 200 U.S. dollars per month. So if you think of that, we are still at a stage where social security benefits need to be given to all these billions of families and small businesses so that they have the cover of insurance, pensions, their children can have scholarships, and subsidies on housing or cars or electric vehicles. 

We are just starting; we are just scratching the surface. Haqdarshak’s mission in the next 7-10 years is to be part of this journey of getting India to a middle income, upper middle-income country, by providing a sense of social security and financial inclusion. And we are playing a small role in that. As an organisation, it outlasts me or the other team members and becomes an institution in itself. 

Anne: I think for you personally, I remember earlier you mentioned the ten years. You said you would give yourself ten years for your personal life. Do you see that extending to 15 years, 20 years, or what's next for you? 

Aniket: I still have about two and a half, three years to go for that. I will probably make that call closer to date, but I don't think I can go away from this problem. I think I am kind of married to the problem’s solution for life. So, I will do something in this space. 

But I genuinely feel that an organisation should look at fresh leadership. Maybe I am the person to take the organisation from 0 to 10, and there'll be a new person, somebody who's done that from 10 to 100 and another new leadership to take it from there and so on. 

That's how you build an institution. That's the thinking. And maybe but in the larger context, I will definitely be involved in the same issues around information, access, financial inclusion, government, and social security. I think these are things that now I can't get away from. 

Anne: Sounds like your dreams have changed. No more leaving the country. 

Aniket: I mean, now I get opportunities to represent Haqdarshak in different countries and come back which works as well. 

Anne: It sounds like your world view kind of expanded the moment you decided to go on the ground, and you realised the beauty within India itself. 

Aniket: And also most importantly, how privileged I am and how under-privileged millions of Indians are. And that's only happened because I was lucky to be born in a family which had the means to send me to receive good education. 

As you see, and you start realising the privilege piece, the luck piece, then it starts hitting you that the dream of going outside is very materialistic. 

Anne: I want to find out more about your relationship with DBS foundation. How has it been and how has it evolved? 

Aniket: Firstly, I think DBS has been one of the most pragmatic, empathetic and entrepreneur-friendly partner and I don't say this only now. I have been associated with DBS in some form or another since 2017 where Haqdarshak was only 18 months old and I myself was about 26, 27. 

We've grown with DBS. Like I said, we started as a DBS NUS start up challenge winner. The most important aspect was that DBS never left us. It's easy for a organisation to say we supported an enterprise and then start looking further. And that's what we see all around us in other partners where they find someone and then they go to the next cohort, into the next cohort, and to the next cohort.

In 2018, I won the DBS grant program in India that really helped us scale our platform big time. It was a game changer for us, which helped us. Then using building that platform received money from Impact Investors. During COVID, the DBS team reached out to us and asked, “What do you need?”. We were able to get our teams access to oxygen machines. 

Apart from that, DBS has also supported us in building a MSME platform. So, if you go to MSME.Haqdarshak.com, it's DBS supported. It's because it was built by the grant we got. 

And right now, as DBS is moving increasingly into India, having acquired a bank in India - DBS is now our largest partner. We just got the largest contract from DBS, India. 

That only happens in an organisation that trusts the entrepreneur. A lot of organisations will give the money and then literally sit on the head of the entrepreneur and say, report on this, do this and that. 

And I think DBS comes from the mindset that once they have identified an entrepreneur, they trust them. That's been the best thing for us as an organisation. 

And in the last five to six years, there were four or five instances at different pivotal points that DBS has helped us and most of the times, they will identify and reach out to us and say, “Let's do something” which, like I said, doesn't happen in other partnerships. 

Anne: I think we are just down to the final question now. Do you have any advice for other entrepreneurs who are looking at issues but afraid of the long road ahead? 

Aniket: Just focus. And write down when you're starting off, what is your broad vision and mission? What is the problem statement? These are things that are probably repeated all the time but are extremely important because you as an entrepreneur should be very clear what you want to solve and why you want to solve it. 

Give yourself a good amount of time to try things out, but at the same time, don't be rigid in the solution. 

As a community of entrepreneurs, we are just getting started. I think we need millions and millions of more entrepreneurs to be solving problems. 

Everyone who aspires to be an entrepreneur should just do it. And like I said today, after ten years of starting on the problem, it looks relatively like a success. But my first three years were utter failures, but I pivoted. 

I never let go of that I wanted to solve this problem. I would really suggest that people do not get disheartened if they find early failures or if they even find success initially, they should also be grounded. 

Anne: I understand that, for you, it was a tough journey and you really believed in the cause. But was there anything else that kept you going during those initial years of difficulty? 

Aniket: I was very lucky to have a team which from day one was committed. We didn't have, especially in the first five years or so, enough money sometimes to pay everyone. 

It's not like we just got a bunch of college kids. Even right now my entire CXO team is made up of women, which is not something that I did by design. It just happened by a fair hiring practice. And all of them come with much more experience than me, 20 over years of experience in certain cases. 

Without them and without the constant belief in the idea, and me, even though sometimes I think they must have felt that I am absolutely crazy, I think that's what’s kept me going. 

And of course, my family who've given me this kind of freedom. They definitely think I'm crazy. But I think at least they have kind of given that support to say that, “Yes, go ahead and do what you feel like.” 

Anne: Yeah, I feel like some people would see that people are relying on them. The team as a form of a pressure point, but it seems to fuel you in a sense. Thank you so much for talking to me. I think this is really enlightening and it's amazing to see how big your company has grown and sometimes crazy is a good crazy. 

Aniket: Thank you so much Anne. 

Anne: And so I've been speaking to Aniket Doegar, co-founder and CEO of Haqdarshak from India, closing the gap between government welfare schemes and the people who actually need access to them across rural India. I'm Anne signing out for The Next Impact Maker.