Haqdarshak

Summary of central and state level schemes (in AP and Odisha) relevant for FPOs and for farmer member households.  

Open

Notes from Feb 15 call with Sambhavna Biswas (Partnerships) today.

• There are examples of Haqdarshak (agents) helping SHGs access loans. Shared the example of a 10 member SHG in Maharashtra whose members were involved in incense production that got a 2 lakh loan to fund input purchases from HDFC. Not clear if the Haqdarshak got term sheets from multiple banks and helped the SHG figure out which was best but cool example

• Interested in working together on a model to share info on schemes relevant for FPOs (both at the FPO level and for their member farmers). Sounds like they started some very early stage work on this in Rajasthan bc they recognize FPOs are a good potential channel to reach lots of farmers

• Haqdarshak has an API which we can query to get back a list of relevant schemes for, say, farmers in Rajasthan

• Bayer apparently uses the API and publishes this info in their app (which i gather does advisory and other stuff as well)

• Sambhavna will share a list of schemes they maintain related to individual farmers and farmer groups

• We scheduled a followup chat for Mon, Feb 28 by which time hopefully we have a better sense for where we are heading…

Notes from Dec 2021 call

A good analog for Farmrise in India that is not agriculture specific but more generally helps households connect with govt programs is Haqdarshak. The FPO research recently done in Odisha and Jharkhand highlighted access to govt schemes / welfare programs as an area of interest.

@Farhad Ali (Unlicensed) had spoken with Haqdarshak a while back

“I was thinking along the lines of using the video-based approach to offer value-added services to their clients. Imagine if they can inform the clients about the health or nutrition schemes that they are eligible for using a video. This would improve the demand for the service and impact the health and nutrition behaviour.

Similarly, the same thing can be replicated with the farming community. You connect the farmers with a scheme that the department provides and share a video that improves the skill or information level of the farmer to do better; for example, a subsidy scheme and a video of best practices jointly do better than one of these alone. And there is strong evidence that supports this idea from Bangladesh and other places.“

Sharing some notes from a call their Chief Growth Officer in Dec 2021

• There are 14k trained Haqdarshaks and 3k active (doing weekly transactions). 

• 90% are women from SHG groups. The persona overlaps pretty closely with VRPs as SRLMs are a major channel for agent acquisition

• Operational in 22 states; most active in Chhattisgarh, MH, MP, Delhi/NCR, UP; Bihar and Jharkhand are second tier states. For reference 250 JEEViKA VRPS trained as Haqdarshaks

• The offering is an assisted tech platform where Haqdarshaks/agents enter some basic demographic info (caste, income, land ownership, HH size, etc.) into a mobile app and get back which schemes a person is eligible for  

• Agents don't enter any PII (Aadhaar, bank account, etc.) into the mobile app since that is not needed to discover eligibility

• Some agents do provide last mile assistance to individuals who apply for welfare programs (filling in forms, submitting to relevant authorities, grievance redressal, etc.)

• There are two models: (1) Livelihood model where agents charge end users a fee for application. There is a rate card for the fee based on the scheme and it ranges from 50 to 350 rupees. This is a one-time fee and Haqdarshak agents keep all of it (2) CSR model where some corporate or NGO has a target beneficiary who they want to avail a scheme so the corporate/NGO pays Haqdarshak the company to cover their platform costs who then compensates the agent (so no cost is borne by the beneficiary) 

• They started with model 1 and model 2 now accounts for 60% of the business

• Interestingly, the agents pay Haqdarshak 120 rupees per month to use the app so presumably the ones who stick around are seeing good ROI on that investment

• I asked whether the Haqdarshak agents would be open to taking on additional data collection responsibilities (eg, parameters that are relevant for the farmer data network like land boundaries, crops grown, dates of key activities, etc.) and what sort of incentive would make it interesting for them

• Madhura is open to having a convo along these lines, next steps are for us to come back with some times for a followup chat.