The exChange Podcast

It’s not just the destination, it’s also the journey. The exChange Podcast traces the journeys of System Orchestrators unlocking exponential change. These journeys highlight hope, possibilities, progress, and mindset shifts. Each episode unpacks the journeys of social entrepreneurs who are restless to see a better world and will do whatever it takes to bring it alive.

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Every Citizen Matters: Reimagining Access to Welfare for 1.4 Billion people

Aniket Doegar (Haqdarshak) | Priya Mantri Ajmera | (C4EC) Siddhartha Menon

From information asymmetry to systemic change, Aniket Doegar, CEO of Haqdarshak, shares how trust, technology, and bold ideas can reimagine access to welfare at scale. Discover his journey, mission, and mindset shifts that drive exponential change to tackle generational poverty for a billion Indians.

[SId]

Hi, welcome to The exChange Podcast. Here we are going to tell stories of system orchestrators and the journeys on exponential change. Today, we have with us Priya Ajmera, who’s the Chief Evangelist at C4EC or the Centre for Exponential Change. And along with Priya, we have Aniket Doegar, who is the co-founder of Haqdarshak, an organisation based out of Pune. I will let Aniket introduce himself a little deeper. Aniket, over to you.

 

[Aniket]

Thanks, Sid. So, hi, I’m Aniket. I’m the co-founder of Haqdarshak. We are working on getting citizens access to social security and government schemes in the country. Citizens, small businesses. Farmers. I mean, 80% of the country is eligible for different kinds of government programs. I am originally from Shimla, born and brought up there, did my schooling there, and then did my commerce and economics degree from Shri Ram College of Commerce, but had no interest in commerce and a deep interest in economics and policy. And that’s how I kind of got pushed into digging up Teach For India (TFI) right after college back in 2010. (I) taught Grade 2 students over two years, about a hundred and ten students and then worked in rural Maharashtra, rural Rajasthan, doing different gigs, trying to build my resume, actually, to go to Harvard. But yeah, I mean, here I am ten years later, at Haqdarshak.

 

[Priya]

We’ll start with this whole big problem that you’re trying to solve. You mentioned how it’s already unfair that low-income families are way behind, and, with information asymmetry, they fall, they get further pushed back. And you see welfare as a way to bridge this gap, bridge this inequity. And so, tell me, why do people need welfare? And what does not having access to the right welfare do?

 

[Aniket]

So I’ll break it into three aspects. One is the macro, which is our country. So I think out of the 1.4 billion people, about less than 10%-  about 130 million people is the consuming power of India, which has 57% of the wealth, which actually the remaining 90% is dependent or eligible for different kinds of government programs. 

 

We are constitutionally a socialist country, which is supposed to work for the last-mile. So the 10% have  90% access, the 90% have only 10%, which is information asymmetry, access to resources, and access to information. So that’s where we start. 

 

And I come to my own status quo.. I belong to that 10%. I am privileged both in terms of economic status, where I was born, and my gender, where I grew up. So very lucky. But I think I also saw a deep inequality growing up. So my mother comes from a family where they all were teachers, she and her sisters. My grandfather was a lawyer working with the government. On my father’s side, my grandfather never finished school. My father didn’t complete college. And has a business. 

So I saw these two varied sides. So there was this sense of… around me, like seeing a lot of privilege, but at the same time, seeing in the work and on a daily basis that people who do not have access to information.  So I think that idea got seeded very early. 

 

But then I think during Teach For India, which I actually only joined, like I said, to see, to experiment, to also learn. It was also a very intriguing aspect, coming from a commerce background, to see work on the ground. But it was in my end-of-year one when I managed to get a few students into the scholarship school of Akanksha. And then I started searching over that summer about what other scholarships are there. Because somebody told me the government has all these scholarships, and this is back in 2010-11. I have a functioning laptop, and I have wired internet cable access. I have all the access, and I could not find information on government schemes. And that bothered me. 

 

And I think that’s where the problem kind of started affecting me even more. And it continued over the next few years. I think I always believed that if you want to build something meaningful and meaningful doesn’t necessarily have to be at scale, But to build something meaningful,  you have to be obsessed with the problem. And those only first 4 or 5 years of pre-formally starting Haqdarshak, I feel like I gradually got obsessed with this problem and this annoyance on why I couldn’t find this information. And this was the first part of the problem that we’d identified. That information is a huge gap, and people need access to this information in their local languages to first identify what are the government programs. 

 

So in about 2014-15, along with a senior from my college, Mayank, we got started and building a Wikipedia kind of platform that and we had naively thought that we would build this platform and people would come on this. And then gradually the second part of the problem started coming to the surface. That information is one part. The second part is access to the last-mile. How do you get people to these technology platforms, where back in 2014-15 there was no 5G 4G, no Jio, no smartphones, very little access. 

 

So I think that was the two-part problem that we started looking at. And overall, I think with a country like India where you have the rich are getting richer and faster and there is this huge middle to low middle income, I would say hole, that is the never ending for people. People are one medical disaster away from getting back into deep poverty. Social welfare becomes very important. It is not just what is sometimes termed as a freebie. It’s a way to keep an economy stable, a society stable. And that’s when I saw that there is a huge gap to be solved.

 

[Priya]

So tell us, what does Haqdarshak mean and how did this idea evolve? You’ve talked about it a little bit, but how did the idea evolve once you got that information is one part, but also access in a way that somebody can come and assist you is another part. So talk to us about the evolution of the idea as well as the evolution of you as a leader. What are the things that went into your head as you started building this organisation?

 

[Aniket]

So, Haqdarshak. Haq in Urdu means ‘Your Rights’. Darshak in Sanskrit means the person or individual who shows you the path. So came together. My other co-founder, PR Ganapathy, Gans as we call him, had actually coined this term as part of another fellowship and we got together in 2015, Me, Gans and Mayank to set up Haqdarshak.

 

We are actually a result of another government scheme to government schemes – Startup  

India and Digital India, because for the longest time I was trying to find people or organisations where I could either incubate the idea or try as hard as possible not to startup because my dream and my mother’s dream at least was that I at least do a Master’s. So I was kind of trying to do that, but along the way, I just couldn’t find any takers because the standard response you got about ten years back was either, “It’s the government’s job, why are you doing this? What does technology have to do with this? Are you from a political party? What is your vested interest? Why do you want to work on schemes?” 

 

And to articulate or explain to people that this can be solved through technology, with scale, by democratisation of information, and it can have a business model, because in 2015, we applied to the Startup India and Digital India Program at IIM Ahmedabad, which was supported by Intel and TCS. Then we applied to an IIT Delhi program, a Nasscom program, initially, luckily won all the competitions, got some free grant money and more importantly, confidence to say that the business model has merit.  And that’s how kind of Haqdarshak got started. We registered in Jan 2016.

 

[Priya]

So tell us more about your own journey as a leader from taking the idea from 0 to 1 and then 1 to 10.

 

[Aniket]

Early on, the learning from 0 to 1, you have this superhero syndrome where you want to do everything, you want to be, as I like to say, be on the dancefloor, and you don’t want to be on the balcony watching the chaos. You want to be part of the chaos. 

 

The first phase of 0 to 1 was all about roll up your sleeves and we will solve for everything. Then the realisation hits that along the way, you need people. You are not going to be able to solve everything. And I think my then journey from 1 to 10, became in terms of building a team, getting way smarter people than me. 

 

And I would like to believe that my team is more qualified. In fact, I tell them all the time that if I were to apply to Haqdarshak now, I wouldn’t get a job because my qualifications just don’t match up. But I think that was the second part of the realisation that you need to be okay to stand back.

 

And I think a lot of entrepreneurs have this, there are two things that entrepreneurs have a

lot, three things I would say. One, they are very stubborn, which is required. They have a lot

of ego, which comes in along the way. And then I think they also are perfectionists. So I

think that was a change that I had to make from that 1 to 10, that a lot of times I failed, I

could do this better. And then I would be okay to say, “Let it be.” 

 

[Sid]

So you spoke of, and which is fairly interesting, one was the personality of a leader, which is where you spoke of ego, and you spoke of being a perfectionist. And how long does it take for someone between 0 to 1 and 1 to 10 to come to the realisation, or let’s say in the C4EC language, reimagine themselves as a leader and say maybe not, and kind of shift and become somebody else? Which is what you did eventually.

 

[Aniket]

For me, it took about 3 to 4 years because I was also 25 when I started. I have seen  entrepreneurs who are way more experienced before starting up, and I think their realisation is much faster because either they have been in such teams or they’ve done that before. For me, it was all new. I never actually worked in a corporate or a fully organised… I always worked in either fellowships or startups. 

 

So for me it took 3 to 4 years. And I think it only comes by experience, and it comes with failure. So when you realise you can’t be in 20 places in one, when you realise when you’re in the field, in the heat and you realise, what am I doing here! Like, why am I here? And then you need more people who can be as crazy as you. Then the time goes into convincing them to say, No, this is not crazy. Join me. And I think that comes and then very clear, I would say realisation of what you want to achieve. 

 

From day one, me and my founding team, we were clear that we wanted to achieve scale. We want to look at this problem not as a pilot, but really look at the numbers because… and scale is subjective. Let me say this way, like I have been a teacher and I, feel like teaching 100 students has been a great achievement because they can go to college. There is no other better way to end generational poverty. But at the same time, in Social Security, it’s all about volumes because we have a billion plus people on Aadhaar. We are talking about 800 million people on the PDS, the ration system.

 

We have 500 million people in Ayushman Bharat. So scale for us was important. And that was the other realisation that if I continue running the organisation like this in ten years’ time, we will still be doing pilots. And that is not something I want to be at. And it also, I would like to add, comes from me going back to the earlier part of my privilege because I could at any point, to be honest, stop and say, I want to go back, I want to shut this. 

 

Not everybody has the economic security or backing from their family to see, experiment and try. A lot of people have financial needs to be covered. I think it was that sense of, if I

look back now to see, arrogance, say, I’ll try. If I fail, it doesn’t matter to me. But I think that is why it is very different for different entrepreneurs and where they are in their journey.

 

[Priya]

And how did the organisation move from starting with the first few assisted welfare delivery to where you are today?

 

[Aniket]

So I think the first step for us, in fact, there was an individual, TP Vincent, who was ex-Cognizant Technology Head. So he had actually made an app which was a vitamin deficiency matching engine, and he was part of an incubator where we saw him and I met him. And then I realised, if you were to just replace the vitamin deficiency with schemes… 

 

So, exactly, we need a matching engine. So the first phase of Haqdarshak was to build an eligibility engine, because what we had identified as the first step was that people do not know what they’re eligible for. Once we figured out the technology actually we realised there isn’t in India, a database of government schemes. So we went about painstakingly going department to department, state by state. And we were lucky that Venkat was back then the Head of Tata Trust, under Mr Ratan Tata. He himself backed us, gave us that initial kind of experimental grant and managed to say go and build a database of schemes. 

 

So, because you have to understand that the problem in India is that schemes are not written in one schema. It’s not written in one format. Each state, on an average has 34 to 35 state Departments. In a state like Bihar, a health department has about 60 Apps running.

So, eligibility usually works with a theorem like a probability theorem. If and or conditions. If you belong to a caste or income or geography, you will get access to schemes. 

 

So how do you take it from different states, putting it together so that took us from 2017 to 2019, two years. But you are able to build a database of about 5000 government schemes in 14 local languages. So that’s how we started building a research base, a product and technology base. And the third aspect, and we realised, is that if you build all these apps, the people are not going to download.

 

If you were to build a B2C app, it would take millions of dollars of VC capital and we couldn’t be true to our mission. So we pivoted to say, we need agents who can do this, who can go door to door. Because our focus was rooted in their low-income India. And, India has the largest network of women agents in the world, 100 million members in the National Rural Livelihood Mission. 

 

And then they had divided into the State Rural Livelihood Mission. So like any social organisation, whichever organisation tells you anything about agents, they are piggybacking on SRLM or Asha workers. The other thing to note about agents, I, at Haqdarshak, say this very clearly that we have trained 45,000 women agents, but only 10% are active and that 10% active is a reality in the sector because 10% of the agent networks in our country do 90%. And that happened. So I think in those next couple of years in Haqdarshak, we focused on training women agents, who took the app, went door to door, screened people and then told them this is what you are eligible for, and then trained them how to apply for different government schemes. 

 

And the other thing about government schemes that we learned in the early years is that people value information a lot. The second biggest barrier to people is documents…Your identity, because the identity becomes the core of Social Security and what you are eligible for. What’s the caste of your father? Where were you born? What’s your income level? Is there any disease in the household? 

 

For all these questions, there are related documentation. If you have the right documentation at the right time, then your name will appear on the list. If you miss out on the documentation, then you’re off the list. That’s the main core part that we are identified is: how do we get people the right documentation at the right time?  

 

[Priya]

So what does this look like on the ground for, let’s say, a farmer or a teacher or a health care worker? What does an assisted model of Haqdarshak look like?

 

[Aniket]

So in the community, we would train our women agents and she then gets trained on the agent app, which is in local languages. If I am the agent and you are a teacher or a farmer or a small business, I’ll ask you a set of 20 to 30 questions. And each question’s answer will prompt the next question, which is based on the eligibility theorem. Then I will tell you you are eligible for these 20-25 government schemes. 

 

To get these schemes, these are the documents required. And then I will go step by step in asking you do you want to get… And then as a citizen you are free to apply to your government citizen centre, go to your political representative, go to the local district office or take help from me as Haqdarshak where I offer you doorstep delivery service and then I help you fill the form. Submit the form. 

 

A lot of these applications are offline even today. You have to either download the form from the website, or create a separate account on the website, or go to the office and get that form filled out physically and submit. So all those processes are done by the agents.

 

[Sid]

So what we have here is, something that, my colleague Sreekar came up with, which is a game called Pictionary. This is essentially largely now based on the words that are in parlance for Haqdarshak and for C4EC. So what we’re going to do is pick one chit, draw, and the other people on the table can guess what it is. So Priya, would you want to go first?

 

[All speakers]

Here’s a pen. And maybe about 30s to draw. Community. You’re absolutely right. Community. Aniket, would you like to go next? Yeah, but I’m terrible at this. Hurdles. Can I say something, and you can edit it? What do they not have? Oh! Inclusion.

 

[Priya]

Ten years back, you were at this place of discomfort, trying to figure out what will solve the problem. Today, you are at a different place of discomfort. And a couple of years back, when we first connected, you called this the seven-year itch of Haqdarshak. From outside in, what you’re doing seems to work. You have reached about 6 or 7 million people. You have redefined what assisting people on their quest of welfare looks like. So what is this new discomfort that you’re at?

 

[Aniket]

I would like to say the first phase of Haqdarshak was from 16 to 19, just exploring whether we could even build technology around this- testing the waters. The second, and I think this has come in every organisation, which is the Covid phase, where you actually scale a lot, a lot of our business models got set in terms of working with corporates. We work with companies, getting their workers and gig workers, small businesses, access to government schemes. 

 

And we actually scaled. And we had our mission statement saying, ‘Every citizen should get access to Social Security,’ and then we brainstormed. And we said one of the things we want to add in that statement is, ‘in our lifetime.’ So that became the itch to begin with because I met a lot of role model entrepreneurs in this space who have been mentors, role models. 

 

But I always felt that we are still, in a way, grappling with different ways of the same problems. And I, of course, have some fantastic work that has happened. One, I was very clear. I’m obsessed with the Social Security problem. How do you make Social Security a more universal, easily accessible, technology-driven, but again, in a lifetime? 

 

So I had to work backwards, looking at my lifestyle at about 25 years left and in that working maybe 15 or 20. So how do you get there? And in fact, it was in one of the RNP step backs where I got a chance, ten minutes on a boat ride, to speak to Nandan. And he said that, spend time with Sanjay and you should really you build something which works, but you need to think, how can it work in the way Aadhaar did? This is a very important aspect of our overall thinking.

 

And that got me thinking. I met Sanjay, I met you and the team, and I think the whole part, how I came in, I think one of the things that I consciously did was that I unlearned everything. I will not come with preconceived notions, because once you work at something for that much that long, you are kind of… You become rigid when you only think this is the way to solve things. 

 

And I think the first six months went into just unlearning myself and believing this was possible. How do you exponentially change? How do you and then scale? And the longer time actually took to convince the team. It was the most interesting part. So it was not a top-down kind of a diktat, “Oh, we will now… we are not going to do this.” It’s like you mentioned, we started our journey in November 2022 – December – January 2023. 

 

We are in March 2025. And I think only recently the entire team has come together and said that yes, we believe in this and today all of us talk one language, which is, for me, amazing to see that we don’t have to… now we are actually only talking about how we could exponentially change.   

 

[Priya]

So, what is this new reimagination?

 

[Aniket]

So I think the goal is that as Haqdarshak, we deliver a million to a million and a half services, which is our average on ourselves, because that keeps us glued to the ground, that keeps us… That’s our actuality, as you would call like the difference in the ecosystem that we ourselves are building technology, while building research, while working with the ecosystem, we are rooted to the ground. But earlier, the thinking was that we ourselves would do 100 million. 

 

And now we are saying while we continue to experiment on the million every year, how do we train other people, work with networks, work with partners to then impact 100 million directly and hopefully with the government and other champions also impact to a billion, which is the need of the country and as one of the goals to also see how this can be taken to other countries? So that’s really the goal. 

 

And really, one of the other things, because of our work over the last decade on the ground, we really now believe in the voices from the ground up. So, a lot of bottom-up approach. And that’s the other exponential change that we want to focus on and a differentiator. So there is the supply side policy framework of the government, which, a lot of times is top-down. 

 

Can we bring a nuanced approach to this bottom-up approach while thinking of scale and covering even the most vulnerable or excluded communities? So I’ll give you an example. We are currently working with the Ministry of Social Justice on a project with the denotified tribes in Maharashtra, 25,000 families, to give them access to Ayushman Bharat. When we went there, a lot of them didn’t even have Aadhaar. 

 

And the first thing I did was ask Sanjay, “Can you connect me to the Aadhaar team?”. And I went to them in Delhi, and there was not a lot of acknowledgement to believe that there are people out there who still don’t have Aadhaar. And because that community is so small, it’s 25,000. If you think about India is not even a drop in the ocean. So but these are communities that are nowhere in terms of their caste, in terms of their geography. And there are many small such pockets. 

 

So how do you build for them as Haqdrshak? So we are ourselves focusing there and getting it executed on the ground with our teams. But then take the learnings, go back to the Ministry and say this is how we can scale. So that’s been the change in approach and that’s how we are looking at things now and seeing that, you know, how can these services reach the absolute last mile and excluded communities?

 

[Priya]

In this quest, you have come up with this new model that you call the DEAR model. Tell us a little bit about that.

 

[Aniket]

So I think, again, as we went along the journey, this is something we co-created with you, Sanjay and the team and it was a very step-by-step process. Our country loves acronyms. So we also came up with one in the hope you will get adopted. But, the DEAR framework essentially is so Discovery, Eligibility, Application and Redressal. 

 

Eligibility is something we built. But what we found in, exploration journey in the first year is that there is a step before E, which is discovery, because let’s take an example that all of us want a home loan. So all of us know a home loan exists. That’s discovery. 

 

Then, even on your smartphone, if you say home loan three times, we get a call from a bank and then they will say, are you eligible? Once you are eligible, you will check your eligibility, get a bank manager or a relationship manager who will help you with the forms, fill them out, which is Application. And through the process of 20 years of home loan, if you have any grievance, there is a redressal team. That’s for the top 10%. 

 

Now, when you look at it from a scheme perspective, like a pension scheme or scholarship scheme for the 80%, there is none of these processes and no step-by-step process exists. I do not know in the first place if a scholarship scheme exists. That’s discovery. Once you know, we build the eligibility engine and then the so on the processes. So I think the first step was to actually interestingly go to step zero. What we thought of Haqdarshak as step one actually became step two. 

 

So we spent a lot of time in building this discovery. And the interesting thing was as we got deeper into this discovery build and we worked with FIDE and Beckn on this, we realised that discovery is universal. We could apply the discovery of schemes or services to everything and anything. And that’s what we are doing today with multiple networks. 

 

We are probably the organisation which is present in the most number of networks right now in getting people, whether it’s farmers or scholarship, and LDC for SMEs. So it’s very interesting. And then post eligibility, this third step comes applications. Applications is what we do like I said, a million on our own. 

 

But then how can we train the ecosystem, whether it’s non-profits, whether it is the government networks, whether it is the banking networks, postal networks, how can we build easy, comprehensive training modules and use now hopefully agentic AI?. That’s one of the things that we want to work on, making it easier for people and agents to not only solve for their communities, but on a meaningful livelihood. And the fourth comes the redressal, because in our country, there is a lot of political push now to get people onboarded on government schemes. In fact, we are seeing all the elections are being won on promises and transfers. 

 

So there is this machinery at the State and Centre which works on onboarding people. You have 50 crore people on Ayushman, 30 crore on e-Shram we have ten crore NPS. But once you are on the pension system or once you’ve got Ayushman, there is no service today which a person in a rural village or in a tier 4/5 town, a low-income family at the time of need doesn’t know which hospital to go. 

 

So, how do you discover when you’re on the system? So we are trying to build that as well, which is in a very early stage. And that’s the framework we are trying to cover.

 

[Priya]

When we talked about this, we said this is one change that Haqdarshak will do. And that will create more and rapid changes. What are these domino of changes that you foresee by enabling discovery at scale?

 

[Aniket]

I think one, we started thinking ourselves more like a horizontal, which is, first of all, an internal mindset change, that we are not a services organisation alone. We are actually a horizontal where discovery can be given to everyone in the network. So it could be a health organisation, an education organisation, a livelihoods organisation, government department where we can enable discovery at scale or eligibility at scale. So I think that’s been a big shift in change in our thinking. 

 

And I think the second is looking at the different organisations or partnerships more as collaboration, rather than competing with them or looking at competition. Now we are looking in the mindset that can we collaborate with them when we do not need to scale, to scale the solution and, still kind of grow very sustainably.

 

[Priya]

Another interesting phrase that we came up with is from Haqdarshak to Haqdarshan. Tell us more about that.

 

[Aniket]

So that comes under the application, the A part. Again, something we work with you and Sanjay and our team. And it was very interesting and kind of I remember in the office, like a eureka moment. Yes, very, very catchy. And that, you know, while Haqdarshak does its own work, how do you get more people to see Social Security in the same way? How do you train networks? How do you train people? Again, can any citizen become a Haqdarshak? 

 

Can you become a Haqdarshak for your domestic worker? Can anyone who has a factory worker or driver or domestic worker or a person in their community, can you become a Haqdarshak for them to tell them about government schemes? Can we make the systems that easy? So that’s where the thinking is coming from. So it’s just not about training. It’s also about the mindset that every citizen can become a Haqdarshak for someone else who requires. Because if we can mobilise that 10% for the 90, that’s the only way we are going to reach that scale.

 

[Priya]

A few years back, you had said that sending 100 students to school was your biggest achievement. With this new exponential thinking, what are these stories of hope and possibilities? If I met Aniket ten years from now, and I asked him and he said, Yes, this works at scale. What is this?

 

[Aniket]

I think ten years from now, or what scale looks like, would be, I mean, what comes to mind is like a) people think of Social Security as how people think of payments today. So Haqdarshak is one of the many organisations. I think success would be that there are many organisations that are in the mainstream, sustainable, in certain cases commercial way, looking at Social security in this country. 

 

So the North Star for me would be to go back in for every citizen, accessing schemes is so easy, where there is this robust, secure, working, efficient system in the backend of multiple network organisations who are making Social Security easy, comprehensive, a lifetime journey for this family, for these families.

 

[Sid]

When you first encountered this challenge, what kind of emotions did it trigger? Because I heard from where you started off in Shimla and eventually, went on your journey. So what was the first thing that you felt, why did you need to be on this journey? What was the one thing?

 

[Aniket]

I think, helplessness. I mean, having access, having privilege and helplessness, then that kind of consciousness to say that I don’t have the limbic speeds. So it’s not that I am not facing this. So I am feeling empathy for someone. It was deep empathy, the feeling of helplessness as well, but then channelising it. 

 

And also I think realising in that even pre-zero journey of four or five years and when I was in rural Rajasthan and Maharashtra, all parts of the country, to try and see or what I like to call borrowed lived experience, to go whether it was my students, whether it was their families, whether it’s in rural Rajasthan, Maharashtra or Delhi. So that was the feeling like and I think those if I think those two kind of powered through in those years.

 

[Sid]

In experiencing discomfort, what are the unmet opportunities and values did you kind of recognise through that?

 

[Aniket]

Integrity is this kind of the most important to me personally, in that kind of I try to build an organisation because and I’d say that’s particularly in the work we do. The people have been so tired of the system and breaking the trust. When I went to the ground and saw, people were kind of… I mean, not really, they didn’t bother. You’ve come here, you’re telling us about schemes. There is no trust that you will follow through. 

 

So what became absolutely important for us is to have the integrity as a core value, to build people’s trust and to follow through, whatever it takes. We have done projects where our services, where we’ve done it in losses, we had put 50 people where probably you had budgets to do five, because we wanted to see the project through. And only and only because we want to rebuild the trust of people on the ground, in Social Security. So I think that was one core value to be in the organisation.

 

[Sid]

Do you want to have any reflections from all the conversations?

 

[Priya]

Yeah, I think for me, I have been working with Aniket for the last one/one and a half years. And for me, it’s been a very interesting co-travelling journey. I have learned a lot about welfare and how it works. What are the things which are breaking? What are the things which are not working? For me, this big pivot of Haqdarshak has been this: Haqdarshak to Haqdarshan. 

 

And for those of our listeners who don’t understand, Hindi, it is, somebody who shows you pathway to anybody, and for me, that has been one of the biggest pivot in the way the organisation is thinking about growing, in the way, the way you’re thinking about different types of solutions and the way you’re thinking about how technology should work. 

 

That has, for me has been the biggest change. It’s been a fascinating journey for me to learn more about it, to co-travel, to reimagine. It’s like a whiteboard that we have been filling with new ideas, new rainbows, new unicorns. And I’m really looking forward to seeing how this goes.

 

[Sid]

Amazing. For me, I think, just speaking to Aniket, I realise that it’s so important to stay fluid, and be open to looking at journeys and zooming out and looking at the big picture constantly, because that’s the only way you can kind of continuously evolve and be where you want to be. And that’s something that’s truly commendable, as a leader, and that’s something that’s very inspiring as well.