Haqdarshak

Enabling welfare access for every citizen

Almost 8% of India’s GDP is spent on social services and ~800million+ citizens from India's population are dependent on these welfare services for various needs. Yet, millions of citizens remain unaware of and unable to access the benefits they are entitled to.

About the organisation

Since 2016, Haqdarshak has been working at the intersection of technology and human connection to bridge the gap between welfare entitlement and access. Their model pairs a tech-based knowledgebase of 5000+ benefits programs and an eligibility engine with trained field agents, typically women from the very communities they serve — known as Haqdarshaks (meaning "the one who shows one their rights.")

Till date, Haqdarshak has enabled access to welfare benefits worth over USD 2.2 billion, reaching more than 8 million citizens across 24 Indian states and union territories. In doing so, they have also created a livelihood pathway for over 55,000 Haqdarshaks, 60%+ of whom are women.

Aniket Doegar
Founder & CEO
Acumen Fellow, Forbes 30 under 30 (Asia), Schwab Social entrepreneur Awardee, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Resident Fellow.

Headquarters: India
Geographies: India
Domains: Equity

Visit Website →

Journey of Exponential Change

Through their pursuit to solve welfare access at population scale, Haqdarshak arrived at two defining realisations. The first: that their role needed to shift from primary doer to enabler — from offering Haqdarshaks (trained personnel) to Haqdarshan (anyone can show the pathway towards welfare). The second: that the discovery problem — getting the right welfare to the right person at the right time — remained largely unsolved.

The Big Quest:
How can we orchestrate an open network to reduce the friction to timely discovery and access to the right welfare at the right time?

Haqdarshak is now unbundling the welfare delivery value chain and opening it up: contributing their schemes repository and eligibility technology as Digital Public Goods, training other agent networks to deliver welfare services, and co-designing open network protocols that allow scheme information to find citizens, rather than the other way around.

To test this, they are running a series of prototypes — exploring whether scheme details published on open networks can be consumed by any platform at scale to improve scheme discovery, whether surfacing citizen needs can improve discovery of eligible beneficiaries, whether digital credential wallets can reduce friction in the application process, and whether AI-enabled assistance can extend the reach of the agent model beyond what human networks alone can achieve.