Haqdarshak Empowerment Solutions Private Limited recently kicked off Yojana Sabha, its annual conference focussing on social security and welfare with an invite-only gathering. Around 80 leaders from the social impact and corporate sustainability domains were part of the conference.
Keynote speakers included Nandan Nilekani, chairman and co-founder of Infosys, Abhishek Singh, President & CEO, NeGD; Suresh Sethi, MD & CEO, Protean; Dilip Asbe, Managing Director & CEO, National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI); Anna Roy, senior advisor, Niti Ayog and Vijay Mahajan, co founder of Pradan and Basix and CEO of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation.
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What is exciting is that in the next 7 years Haqdarshak is trying to reach 100 million families. We have a unique population scale digital infrastructure which can be used across the country. I think Haqdarshak has the opportunity to leverage all this public infrastructure and create a scalable platform to reach 100 million people. And this is something we have to do. What we have discovered in our Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) journey is that you have to think about scale. Reaching a few million people is not enough to move the needle. We have to reach 100s of millions of people,”
Nilekani said in his opening speech.
Haqdarshak announced its inclusion in the
Scalers program by Societal Thinking, a community of change leaders with an audacious vision to create exponential and sustainable social change. As part of this program, Haqdarshak will co-create a national level digital public good for schemes and also publish an ecosystem level report on State of Welfare in India.
The day saw six panel discussions with lead organizations, Veddis Foundation, Udaiti Foundation, Sattva Consulting, Societal Thinking, Dalberg and KOIS. These panel discussions covered social protection through the lens of gender, climate, financial models, CSR investment, technology and government innovation.
IAS officers from Maharashtra, Himachal Pradesh and Manipur presented case studies about how they cracked critical problems to ensure adoption of social protection programs at scale.
During the conference,
Haqdarshak and Mastercard also announced their collaboration to launch a unique prepaid version of the Yojana Card that is aimed at improving the last-mile delivery of benefits and subsidies to citizens and to enhance access to financial services in India.
Haqdarshak’s flagship offering, the Yojana Card, will be leveraged as a base for new product development. The Yojana Card is a unique, digitally-enabled social security card for beneficiaries to access government schemes, social security, financial services and other welfare services for their family and business — via a single channel enabled by last-mile support.
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We are excited to start this journey with a well-established and trust-worthy brand like Mastercard. This collaboration will enable Haqdarshak to speed up its product launches and reach its goal of impacting 100 million Indians by 2030,” said Aniket Doegar, CEO and co-founder, Haqdarshak.
The Yojana Sabha will be localized with regional sub-events over this year with local partners and grass roots organizations. This year the conference saw participation from organizations including but not limited to Flipkart, Amazon, DBS Bank, Capgemini, Forbes Marshall, IDH,
Data.Org, IDR, Hindustan Zinc, Agami, Urban Company, Acumen, and India Post Payments Bank.
Haqdarshak is bridging the information and access gap between citizens and social protection services (both government and private) using tech and a last-mile field agent network of ‘Haqdarshaks’ (most of whom are women). The company has digitized (and continues to digitize) information related to government schemes on its multiple digital portals in 14 vernacular languages. Present in 24 states in India, Haqdarshak has trained over 30,000 agents so far and provided benefits worth over INR 4200 crore to over 3 million families.
