Many Government Schemes but less Information about them!

This article Part 1 of our work under the mentorship of Shri Atul Kumar Tiwari, Additional Secretary, Ministry of I&B and as a part of the P3E program by Vision India Foundation. This is co-authored by me and Shweta Chandar.

We worked on analysing and assessing the various challenges in creating a one-stop portal which provides access to customised information to know about and apply for government schemes.

To start with, let us get a bird’s eye view of the whole challenge before deep diving into nuances.

There are a pool of government schemes and services which are provided to citizens by the Government and here are some examples to it.

During the lifecycle of every citizen, there are a bunch services that a citizen needs; starting from a birth certificate, registering a tap connection in the household to a death certificate. In the case of schemes, government has several schemes right from vaccination, scholarships, skill development to pension and old age schemes.

However, one has to note here is that schemes are also targeted based on a citizen’s attributes such as caste, disabilities, gender, profession, assets, etc.

We will specifically talk about schemes and not services here.

There are broadly two types of Government schemes which is Central Sector schemes and Centrally sponsored schemes and the dynamics varies according to sectors, fund sharing and implementation relationship between the central and the state government.

In order to understand different aspects of availing government schemes, let us imagine a funnel. The size of the funnel diameter represents the size of a citizen segment. Every scheme is designed for a particular target segment and estimated beneficiaries are calculated basis the Census, SECC data, etc.

These are illustrated numbers and one can visualize the challenges here when the citizens who receive the benefits are far lesser than the target number of citizens.

This can be compared to a sales pipeline as well where one has a target customer segment in mind and it decreases as we move forward and customers who end up paying for the product/service is a fraction of your segment. The goal, however, is not to make the two ends equal but to maximize it.

Let us also now visualize India’s economic pyramid. People in the high income segment have a less need of government welfare schemes but a high capability of applying online. On the other side, people in the lower income segment have a very high need of government welfare schemes but have a low ability to apply online. Hence, targeted assistance is required here.

Coming down to an individual level, there are a lot of challenges one citizen faces. We, through primary and secondary research have explored some of these challenges.

If we take an individual citizen and start mapping challenges along the citizen journey, we can also plot these challenges in the journey.

We also did a survey in 8 languages and disseminated it on ground a primary survey, various online channels, community groups and fellows on ground and social media. Our respondents included 390 respondents from 17–18 states and we covered questions on awareness and barriers to access government schemes.

While going to government office again and again and co-operation from government officers is still the greatest challenge faced by people, the second challenge is that people are not aware of existing government schemes out there and do not know what is the right scheme for them.

Morever, people also mentioned that they do not get upfront information on their eligibility criteria, documents required for availing the scheme and the channel through which they should apply for the particular scheme (whether it is through a taluka office, a bank, a hospital, CSC, etc.)

Subjective inputs were also collected in local languages from people.

Subjective suggestions were also received and upon re-searching more, we found that there is no government portal which provides a searchable database of the government schemes by sector and target segment

We can see from some of the subjective responses that people are stressing there should only be one portal to search about schemes, check their eligibility and a facility to apply online.

To understand the information overload on a citizen, let us see this!

Where should a citizen go to discover schemes? Where can a citizen check his eligibility? Where can one get details on eligibility criteria, documents required? Where can one apply?

To answer all this questions, where should one go? Should one go to a startup named Haqdarshak’s website? Should one visit MyGov? Should one download UMANG app? Should one go to their State Government’s G2C Portal? Should one go the nearest CSC? Or should one go through the pain of going to every Ministry’s websites, download PDFs to know about different schemes?

When you visit all of these, one can see all of them are incomplete solutions which do not cover the entire journey from discovering to availing benefits. Some portals will only let citizens check their eligibility in two languages and some portals have a long directory of government schemes and services but one cannot discover the right schemes for which he/she is eligible for.

Surprisingly, there is no one stop government portal which citizens can quickly go to for getting all this information first hand. Also, a lot of State government portals mostly provide the option of two languages — English and the state’s local language. However, due to migration, having the option of viewing information in multiple local languages is a must.

These are pressing, yet basic challenges in e-Governance today. However, India has seen increasing smartphone and internet penetration since years. This, combined by content localization can increase government services adoption. While, it is notable to see that the Government has been creating these building blocks for e-governance such as Aadhar, UPI, Service Plus, PayGov, Digilocker, PFMS and DBT and the efforts are commendable, it is important to address information overload, information asymmetry and local language issues.

Part 2 will cover aspects of how an ideal solution should look like, both at the front end and the back-end and Part 3 will cover all this with examples and on-ground research on particular schemes.

Thanks for reading!