|
About Aniket Doegar |
|
Aniket Doegar (he/him) is the CEO and co-founder of HESPL (Haqdarshak Empowerment Solutions Private Limited), a social impact organization working on easing access to welfare.
An alumnus of SRCC, Delhi, Aniket first started out in the development sector as a TFI (Teach for India) Fellow. Over the course of the last 12 years, he has co-founded non-profits and various other organizations in this space. Recently, he was also an Acumen and Unreasonable fellow. In 2019 he was recognised under Forbes 30 under 30 Asia cohort and in 2022 as the Schwab and WEF Social Entrepreneur of the year.
For the last 7 years, Aniket has been leading the Haqdarshak team with his passionate drive for creating impact at scale. Aniket was also on the advisory board of Teach for India and is currently a board of trustee at the YP foundation. Haqdarshak uses a mobile app and field force of 30,000+ trained women agents to help citizens discover, apply for, and benefit from Government and Private schemes / benefits. They've helped 2.5 million+ families and micro businesses get USD 750M.+ in benefits, while the women entrepreneurs earned USD 2M+.
|
|
1 Haqdarshak has gained a reputation as a prominent impact enterprise in India, and your recognition as the Social Entrepreneur of the Year (SEOY) India Award winner in 2022 is a testament to the impact that Haqdarshak has made. Can you tell us the story of Haqdarshak from your perspective, including its founding, evolution, and key milestones that have led to its current success?
|
Aniket Doegar, the co-founder of Haqdarshak, was working with rural communities in Pune as a ‘Teach for India’ fellow when the government launched the Right to Education [RTE] Act.
This scheme provides free education in private schools for the disadvantaged through quotas. When Aniket tried to get some families registered for the lottery for the quota, he was met with a plethora of challenges — no documents with the families, touts cheating families under the pretext of welfare benefits, lack of awareness in the community etc. He decided to do a quick survey on other schemes and realized that the story was pretty much the same. This is where the idea for Haqdarshak was born.
Aniket’s model was simple:
- Use technology to bridge the information gap
- Develop an assisted-tech platform that could be accessed via an app
- Train select community members for on-field implementation
- Provide end-to-end application support to community members
In return for their service, the community members may charge a small fee which would lead to both personal and community empowerment. This idea found interest in the other co-founders and eventually, Haqdarshak was registered as a private limited company on Jan 06, 2016.
|
2 Presently, what metrics do you use to measure the success of Haqdarshak’s programs and services?
|
The metrics and approach for measuring impact for various stakeholders in the Haqdarshak value chain differs. The ultimate impact goal for Haqdarshak is measuring the value of benefits which have been unlocked for our end users.
Some common metrics for end users include:
1. Utilization of the benefit the individual has received
2. Change in savings or income
3. Change in financial behavior
4. Grievance redressal needs
5. Change in awareness about welfare schemes
6. Change in confidence of unlocking future welfare schemes
For our agents, the impact measurement approach focuses on their capacity building and income earning capabilities. Through various programs, some of the metrics which the team evaluates are listed below:
- Digital literacy levels
- Social, economic and physical mobility
- Access to leadership, educational and entrepreneurial opportunities
- Household expenditures
- Improved decision-making power.
|
3 Could you discuss Haqdarshak’s financial sustainability model and how you plan to grow the enterprise in the future?
|
Today Haqdarshak primarily engages with organizations - a mix of philanthropies, corporates (through their CSR programs), government departments to design projects focusing on welfare schemes linkages. Which is why most of our revenue is institutional. Over the last few years, we have built and piloted products and services which will enable us to tap the retail market. These will be launched over the next few months. The direct to customer products and services are the major levers to Haqdarshak’s growth. Our 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. These welfare services largely include access to social security programs including insurance and pension, direct benefit transfers (DBT) and identification documents; all of which are critical to drive upwards social mobility. Haqdarshak has already conducted a pilot of 11,000 individuals who have the base version of the Yojana Card. These individuals have been provided support to unlock benefits from insurance, pensions and DBT schemes.
|
4 When bridging the gap between people and government schemes, what are some of the consistent problem areas that you’ve noticed? How have your initiatives worked on solving those problem areas?
|
One of the recurring challenges has been around identity documentation which is critical for unlocking benefits from welfare schemes. This problem is consistent mostly with the unorganized and migrant labor force. At Haqdarshak, our first step is to provide our services to users to get the missing documents in place. In case of incorrect documentation, or KYC, the Haqdarshak support agent also provides support services to rectify the documents. We have also come across capacity issues when it comes to engaging in digital finance transactions. To solve this, we also train our Haqdarshak support agents to provide digital and financial literacy training to end users
|
5 Could you share a success story of a Haqdarshak beneficiary and the impact it had on their lives?
|
Haqdarshak is today 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 2.7 million families. For us, each of the 2.7 million end users is a success story. One of the stories is from Andhra Pradesh. Yedhula Narayanamma is the only earning member of her family, bringing in INR 5000 every month. She was unable to complete her education, resulting in lack of job opportunities. With a family completely dependent on her, Yedhula was struggling to make ends meet.
Yedhula was unaware of the YSR EBC Nestham Scheme — providing annual assistance of INR 45,000 to women belonging to the economically backward class and the upper caste. This scheme would prove to be a big relief to women like Yedhula who have to take care of families within limited means. Our ‘Haqdarshak’, Swarnalatha, introduced this scheme to Yedhula.
Yedhula applied for the YSR EBC Nestham Scheme with Swarnalatha’s help at every step of the process — including tracking the application online. Yedhula is grateful for this intervention as it gives her a chance to become financially independent.
We hope to ease the struggles of many others like Yedhula who are burdened with poverty. They need welfare to support their livelihoods — but first they need awareness.
|
6 How has the funding landscape been for Haqdarshak? What advice would you give to investors who are interested in investing in the Indian impact investing market?
|
We started Haqdarshak with equity-free grants under the Start up India program and competitions. Since then we have raised money from angel investors, seed and early stage funds in 3 rounds.
Largely the funding has happened with impact focussed funds like Acumen, Beyond Capital , 3i Partners, Upaya , Village Capital and HiiL. Apart from this we have also accessed debt from Caspian and Grameen Capital. We would like to now raise strategic investment from large VCs and corporate groups aligned to the vision and growing Indian market of the next billion users. For investors, we would advise on looking at India and this market with a positive, long term and patient capital perspective. With growing digitization and adoption of digital public infrastructure Indian markets are going to grow exponentially.
|
|