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Student entrepreneurs in Kerala have developed a mobile app that delivers various welfare schemes of the state government to intended beneficiaries of the marginalised sections.
The students were trained and guided by Corporate360 (C360), a successful B2B start-up in rural Pathanapuram, with a clientele across the global and ‘social impact’ outlook locally.
Poor awareness
Named ‘Thanal’, the app can be downloaded from Google Playstore. It will be made available in the App Store also. Most of the targeted users are semi-literate and semi-urban.
Government benefits mostly do not reach the beneficiaries simply because they don’t know about them. This is what prompted C360 to work on ‘Thanal’, says Varun Chandran, Chief Executive.
A mobile app and web technology platform, it can work even without internet connectivity and gauges a candidate’s eligibility for welfare scheme by asking seven to 10 questions. “In 2017, while volunteering in rural villages of Kerala, I saw that many citizens at the bottom of the social pyramid don’t know about welfare schemes they are eligible and can apply for, " says Chandran.
“These schemes,” he told BusinessLine , “are intended for the bottom 25 per cent of the population for whose benefit we have put up the app.”
Civic-tech solutions
Tracing the app’s genesis, he said that during an annual startup conference of the Kerala Start-up Mission in 2017, IT Secretary M Sivasankar had urged start-ups to come up with civic-tech solutions.
He mooted the idea of a welfare scheme app to Chandran, who handpicked a team of student entrepreneurs. It soon received support from Kerala IT Mission and the Public Relations Department.
Sanju Payankannur and Akhil Suresh, graduate students of College of Engineering, Idukki, constituted members of the student startup support project. “Our aim is to reach millions, and to be able to do that we had to build it like a public scalable platform and back it with a research engine,” says Sanju Payankannur.
Assisted model
The twosome focused on integrating research with technology which was critical to ensure impact design and enable scale, Chandran said.
Acclaimed as ‘ICT-led social innovation by youth innovators’ from the state, ‘Thanal’ went on to raise about ₹1 lakh from C360.
According to Chandran, on the anvil is an assisted model, where a Panchayat Member, an Anganvady teacher or an Asha worker can be trained to use the app to help citizens.
Social workers, public servants, and government staff also may access welfare scheme data on their phone during meetings and discussions with citizens, and advise them directly. ‘Thanal’ is also experimenting with speech-to-text models to make the application more accessible. This will be helpful for visually impaired and those not well versed with using mobile app.
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