Government schemes should meet people on WhatsApp
Small business owners miss schemes they qualify for because finding them is hard. The channel they already use every day could fix that, if it can be trusted.
Amogh Suman
India has a very large number of central and state schemes for small businesses and entrepreneurs: credit guarantees, subsidised loans, training, market access and grants for specific groups, including women entrepreneurs. Many go under-used, not because the people they serve do not qualify, but because they never find out, or give up on the paperwork.
Portals help. The national myScheme platform, for example, lets citizens search for schemes they may be eligible for. But a portal still asks people to come to it, know what to search for and read through eligibility rules. For a busy shop owner, that is a lot to ask.
Why WhatsApp
WhatsApp is already where Indian small businesses talk to customers, suppliers and family. It needs no new app, works on modest phones, handles voice notes as easily as text, and is familiar to people who would never fill in a web form.
A scheme assistant on WhatsApp can do something a portal cannot: ask questions. What is your business? Where is it? How long has it been running? Is it registered? From a handful of answers, it can narrow hundreds of schemes to the three that matter, and explain each one in plain language.
The best scheme finder asks the questions. It should not expect people to know what to search for.
What it must get right
Trust. Scams that impersonate government schemes are common, and many of them arrive on WhatsApp. An official assistant needs a verified business account, a number published on government sites, and a firm rule never to ask for money, OTPs or bank details.
Accuracy. Schemes change. An assistant that recommends a scheme that has closed, or gets an eligibility rule wrong, does real harm. The scheme data needs an owner, a source and a date on every entry.
Handover. Finding a scheme is the first step. The assistant should lead to the actual application, or to a person at a local office, not leave people with a list.
Language. It has to work in the languages people speak, and by voice as well as text.
Who should build it
The obvious owner is the government body that runs each scheme, but schemes cut across ministries and states, and citizens do not care which department a scheme belongs to. The more useful model is a shared assistant drawing on a single, maintained source of scheme data, with each department responsible for keeping its own entries current.
The technology is not the hard part. Keeping the data right, and earning trust in a channel full of fraud, is.