Building citizen engagement into the implementation of welfare schemes in rural India

Abstract

Citizen feedback on the implementation of social welfare schemes can help fine tune their design, understand problems, and assess the benefits and impact from these schemes. Such feedback loops however are singularly missing in most schemes in India, and are conveyed only indirectly via civil society and social audit organisations that try to serve as a bridge between citizens and the government. We leverage the deep penetration of mobile phones in India to design a suite of IVR (Interactive Voice Response) tools that can help capture community perceptions, improve awareness of the people, and verify official records directly by the beneficiaries themselves. In the context of a rural employment guarantee scheme, we evaluate these tools in a few villages in the state of Haryana and demonstrate that there is good scope for using IVR tools to serve as a citizen engagement channel for welfare schemes. Our contribution lies in outlining several use-cases for technology interventions, and uncovering nuances that should be addressed if such systems are integrated into the implementation of social welfare schemes.

A Real-Time IVR Platform for Community Radio

“…Previous studies have investigated the role that IVR-based platforms have played within different settings in India. These include embedding answering systems through IVR in community radio stations [15,34], sharing knowledge around farming practices through interactive voice forums [24], motivating citizens to be aware and engage more with their local communities through citizen journalism [5,20,32] as well as giving the opportunity to local community members to exchange ideas regarding employment opportunities [33]. Other studies have explored the use of IVR systems in content creation and dissemination in rural areas and documented the merit of locally created content [1].…”

“…The common thread among all these studies is that they support asynchronous interaction between the listeners. Ongoing challenges with these systems exist in the form of poor user experiences manifested in tedious and drawn-out interactions with extensive menu structures [5,18].…”

The Elusive Model of Technology, Media, Social Development, and Financial Sustainability

“…As an example, we successfully piloted two exciting projects related to governance, and in both we engaged closely with the government, but neither was adopted by the state for scale-up. The first was a system that provided voice-based notifications to workers on a national employment rights programme for when their wages were disbursed, and allowed them to dispute it and register a grievance in case of a discrepancy [47,48]. We took the findings to the central government who went as far as forming a committee but eventually none of the recommendations were taken into consideration, with no transparency about the process.…”

Understanding mobile money grievances from tweets

“…Marathe [25] studied the scaling of complaint redress. Chakrabory [6,7] has studied the impact of complaints and redress in jobs programs. Gaut [15] looks at automatic methods of complaint classification for appropriate routing.…”