NetO - Come Together!

The problem we intend to solve is improving the quality of life in rural communities across India. We believe that this can be done via active community participation.

There are a lot of common interests that exist in both urban and rural communities. In urban communities, organizations like the resident welfare association or housing societies cater to administrative (waste management, resource management, security) and cultural (community celebration of festivities) activities of the resident communities. Other organizations (driven by market demands) cater to bigger localities (a local bulletin).

With the advent of the internet, digital forums have further increased avenues for information and interaction. It is now common to have Whatsapp groups, community Facebook pages, security apps and so on.

Urban communities are relatively dense (suburban Mumbai has over 21,000 people/sq. km as per 2011 census); hence reaching out to them physically is not very cumbersome. People in urban areas move residences more often than rural areas; despite that, due to the organizations and the digital networks, a new resident gets seamlessly inducted into the community.

Rural communities are rooted with generations living for hundreds of years in the same place. There is lot of familiarity and an overall understanding of the community among the residents. People are traditional and set in their ways and external influences are low.  Community interactions are mostly physical - at market places, village fairs, cultural events, administrative forums (gram sabha, social audits).

Villages are small but sparse (around 1500 people in 5sq.km). Physical mobility within the village is typically by walk or a two-wheeler. Some level of public/private transport is typically used across villages. Due to the spread-out hamlets/habitats and due to closed groups within villages, conveying information physically can be cumbersome (door-to-door or via drumming through the village).

The wide and affordable availability of 3G networks even in rural areas has impacted the rural communities too. There is substantial increase in the usage of smart-phones and internet apps (45% increase in rural users since 2019 Nielsen Bharat 2.0 Study). This is mainly for watching videos (Sharechat, Facebook, Tiktok); apps for communication (Whatsapp), ecommerce and financial services are used to a smaller extent.

In rural areas, the usage of mobile apps is (incidentally not by design) individual-centric; unlike their physical world, in the virtual world, there is no familiar community that the individual is a part of. While this paradigm might suit the relatively-anonymous, driven, mobile, Internet-savvy urban resident, the not-so-digital-savvy rural resident does not perceive the virtual world as a place to learn from, interact with or participate in the community. Further, as there is an information-overload on the internet without any community focus, distilling useful information is cumbersome.  With limited choices, the rural user escapes into this digital world largely for personal entertainment.

As a result, the rural community is not able to reap the benefits of easy connectivity for the betterment of the community as a whole. We feel that there is lot to be gained by filling this gap. 

NetO is a digital platform designed for rural communities. It consists of a community resident mobile app, and stake-holder portals. There is an underlying community context (based upon the geographic location) and so a rural user logs into familiar territory (and that familiarity brings comfort and is not intimidating) and interacts with the forum from within that context.

The app is –

• a virtual social-media-like meeting place for community members to post their own content and consume content of common interest posted by other members
• a platform for dissemination of information of common interest to everybody  (welfare program metrics for their village and comparisons with neighbouring villages and with the state, notifications of local events, weather, government announcements of local significance etc.)
• The hyper-local (i.e. very specific data pertinent only to the village - this is distinct for each of the 650,000 villages) information , that comes along with the app,  is sourced from public domain and curated suitably
• Local posts by representatives of the community, service providers, local devices are also made available via the app
• Information is presented in easy-to-understand formats i.e info-graphics and coloured indicators are used to denote community performance vis-à-vis its peers and also within the state, scrolling timeline with background images, icons over text in general, regional language text labels, etc.
• Works both in an online and offline mode to handle intermittent down-times of the network in rural areas

The NetO backend analytics engine pushes a lot of community information and nudges further discussions (via broad-casted polls and surveys, quizzes) and participation in a certain direction. The community-specific content is collected periodically and programmatically (Open APIs) from various state portals available in the public domain. This content is then analysed and meaningful snippets/excerpts are pushed to the user.

There is a lot of information available on the Internet that is relevant to the community; however, the app factors the user behaviour (time spent, number of clicks, depth of clicks, etc.) and measured amounts of content are presented for a better experience and cognition.

The stakeholder portals are role and hierarchy specific dashboards. They contain aggregated versions of the community data and provide insights at higher levels (For example, the commissioner of a food-security program might want to know whether the grains have been picked up by all the below-the-poverty-line beneficiaries of the state and take suitable action based upon this, whereas at the lower level (also known as district, the same information will be scoped for the district alone); an elected representative may want to know the performance of various public programs of his constituency)  (At this stage we intend to initially pilot the community resident app and work on the stakeholder portals later).

The existing apps do not serve the rural community well and the  existing social apps do not come with any out-of-the-box content. They expect individuals to contribute to all the content. The NetO app, on the other hand, comes with an out-of-the-box virtual rural community as the context for every user. It will have base content tailored to the lives and interests of the local community. This hyper-localization makes it a relevant, familiar and friendly platform to a rural user.

India’s social welfare expenditure is very large. Nearly $40 billion were spent in 2022-2023 spent towards social development; this includes food subsidy(over 2/3rds of the total households), rural employment guarantee, free education, health and rural development - indiabudget.gov.in). While there has been great progress in poverty alleviation, over 20% of the rural population(~ 205million people) lives in poor conditions (UNDP, 2022). These are disadvantaged people with poor literacy and awareness, diverse challenges and spread across remote areas.  Given the adoption of mobile technology in rural India, a purpose-designed digital forum such as NetO can empower the rural communities regarding welfare and work as catalyst in this process of accelerating rural progress for all.

Below are examples of useful actionable information

• It would be useful to know whether the local ration shop is open for all the days it is meant to. In case of exceptions, the awareness of such cases can prompt action by the community so as to improve the outcome.
• If midday meals are being served in the neighbouring village and not in one's own village, then the locally elected representatives can use this information and take up this matter with the concerned officials.
• State initiatives, that are advertised by a physical beat/drumming around in the community, can use this app to broadcast their messages (for example, health insurance registration camp, or seasonal crop insurance).
• Details of development initiatives can be put out on this forum. The villager need not depend upon hearsay or physically visit the local Panchayat office.
• Availing community benefits can be accelerated by knowing about successes/achievements in the neighbouring villages. For example, if some renewable energy infrastructure has been setup in a village, this information can be selectively shared with the nearby villages.
• Metrics driven village dashboards can serve as a benchmark for the local leadership.
• People in the village can get to know about local government funds available in their village and their usage without having to navigate through various websites or navigate through the power structures for some basic information.

The NetO app also intends to aggregate information at various hierarchies - so while the village administration will be able to see the metrics for the village, the higher level officials (the development officer of a sub-district) have available to them the same for all the villages under their jurisdiction. By receiving relevant contextual data, various stakeholders (such as villagers, panchayat representatives, higher officials, etc.) can take an empowered and an informed approach to resolving issues and improving the outcomes.

Our team consists of experienced software professionals with top academic qualifications and over 100+ years of experience in the development of software for global companies. Hence the team has a very sound and extensive understanding of technology and and software life-cycle i.e. taking an idea from conceptualization to production.

For the past 10 years, the team lead and a team member have been working very closely with solutions relating to the delivery of various public services and welfare schemes within the Indian context in multiple states. They have experience in working in a social start-up as well as with government department regarding welfare based solutions for rural communities.

The team lead was a Co-founder and Executive Director at Haqdarshak ( a social start-up) and has worked extensively in improving the access to various welfare schemes across the country. During her 4.5 year tenure as Chief Programs and Solutions Officer, the company managed to reach over a million citizens for state benefits and social security. 

Her experience at Aadhaar (biometric id system by the Government of India) is also very relevant as it involved scale, rural India and welfare schemes. During her tenure at Aadhaar (as Manager State Projects, Regional Office Bengaluru), she was responsible for enrolment and adoption of Aadhaar by 4 of the southern states. She worked closely with the governments (both at state and district levels) to ensure meeting of enrolment targets and also to incorporate it in their public programs. The role provided her with ample opportunities to innovate, prototype and pilot Aadhaar based apps. Prior to the India based projects, the team lead headed the wireless and mobile practice at Patni Computer Systems (now Capgemini).

The team member was the Chief Technology Officer at Haqdarshak. The multi-lingual platform uses mobile and Web based technologies extensively in this solution and was designed to work under various constraints such as offline/online mode, low bandwidth, low-literacy user base, small footprint installable, hot inbuilt updates). Prior to Haqdarshak, he was the head of SeMT(State eGovernance Mission Team) in Maharashtra for 1 year and with a senior consultant with the IT dept. in Karnataka for 2.5 years. He also taught (Maths, Physics, Computer Programming) students at a local senior school. Prior to that, he was a Vice-president at Patni Computer Systems heading the Consumer Electronics Business Unit.

One of the team members recently consulted on an IT system for a nation-wide program towards the eradication of tuberculosis in India. The team also has a UIUX specialist who brings in the latest techniques into the design for a great user experience. The team member has worked on mobile designs for India based products.

The Agile process is being used for the development of the software in an iterative manner. Once we have the minimum MVP (May end), we intend to pilot the prototype with select grassroots organizations and representative users for their inputs. This continuous learning and feedback process will be followed to refine its features prior to the state-wide release the product (Q4).

The idea of an app/forum to improve rural living conditions, especially with the increased penetration of mobile networks and smart-phones in rural India, has been a backdrop of the work that our team members have been involved with for almost a decade. 

For the past 6 months, a greater focus on understanding the gaps in the current mobile apps used in rural India and the need for a digital mobile community forum has been brainstormed and conceptualized. The complexity of the issue and the design nuances involved in engineering a set of co-related solutions is well understood by the team. The broader perspective here was to envisage product suite or a set of apps that caters to various stakeholders associated with the problem. 

The initial focus was to define the requirements of a rural villager centric app. The objective of the app is to present useful information in an easy and interesting manner without overwhelming the user. The intent is to engage with the user on community related issues and get them involved.

During the past 3 months, the requirements of the initial app has been worked out, the UI/UX design and prototyping completed, the architecture and detail design of the software modules and the database is now completed. The implementation is underway and an initial version of this working prototype is expected to be tested and completed by May. Further, a 3 month pilot is planned to roll out this cloud-based solution to couple of villages in two sub-districts in the state of Maharashtra for initial feedback and refinement before a wider rollout by Q4.

Reaching out and empowering people to gain access to welfare and opportunities to improve their lot is a situation that exists in numerous societies across the world. 

The solution space for this problem is complex and requires people and advisors from various disciplines. We see MIT-Solve as a global reputed forum backed by eminent people - leaders in their fields of expertise. We also see it as a platform keen to encourage organizations and innovations focused on improving the lives of millions of disadvantages communities. Apart from the domain of social development, we also see this platform as a great support for our entrepreneurial start-up journey.

Getting an opportunity to be part of the Solver teams will definitely give us a boost monetarily (we are currently bootstrapped with our own funds) - but more importantly gives access to a network that can work as a suitable sounding board as we go on this journey. We hope to leverage the experience available in this network and not reinvent the wheel - so to speak. It would be extremely encouraging to get recognized by the Solve team and give us the motivation and hope to tackle this problem.

Although at present various factors conducive to improve the lives of millions of people in rural India exist such as - 

• increased spending on welfare by the government
• publicity, communication resulting in greater awareness about these programmes
• reliable, near real-time data in the public domain
• various digital initiatives across the country (UPI, data.gov.in, Aadhaar identity, IndiaStack)
• penetration of 3G/4G networks across India
• increased usage of smart-phones and mature user base in rural India 
• a Tech4Good and Make-for-Bharat developer community

there is still a need for a catalyst to accelerate this process of development. 

Given the sheer numbers, the remoteness, diversity in challenges and dispersion of the disadvantaged communities, the key to achieving this acceleration is to bridge the information and awareness gap along with nudging people within the community to seek solutions. 

Any such intervention that hopes to act as an effective catalyst must therefore make good use of 

• the fortuitous easy availability of mobile technology even in the remote rural areas and
• empowerment of the local community 

as key pillars of its strategy.

The current apps that are available in rural India are mainly for personal entertainment. These apps have been designed for urban individual users and patched to work with constraints that exist in rural India.

Our product is essentially designed with the sole focus on the needs of the rural communities. Apart from the constraints and consideration, it also uses this context of the specific village as central to the content within the app.

Presently, even for administrative officials, information about a village is buried in various islands that require skills to extract relevant information and assimilate. There are rarely any exceptions/deviants that are highlighted for action.

For instance - useful exception reports that can be acted upon are 

1. No FPS (fair price shop – that provides subsidized grains) functioning in a given village for over a period days. 
2. Mid-day meals not being served at a school for a week. 
3. NREGA (guaranteed work program for rural India) attendance not marked for over a month.

Further data about each of these programs is available via the associated ministry and department portal separately and there is no easily available cohesive comprehensive picture of the state of these programs at a village level.

We hope to bridge this gap that exists in a village-centric view and perspective. At the moment there is no such app/platform available for rural India.

Our solution weaves together all these elements in a manner that is palatable to the rural users resulting in greater awareness, increased  aspiration, greater belief that change is possible by sharing of local successes, learning from neighbourhood solutions, community driven conversations, troubling shooting of local priority issues and so on. We hope that the app can ignite minds and lead into suitable action for the community. 

At the backend, the platform will use big-data analytics to generate village based status for various development initiatives. These metrics will be prioritized based upon the relative performance and filtered information will be fed into the front end for prompting/nudging the community into action. 

The front-end app factors user behavior while serving content. A beginner is provided smaller amounts of information whereas a pro is enabled to dig deeper and explore more.

IoT will also be used in order to disseminate transient but useful information to the community (arrival of say the Asha worker, opening of the local ration shop, tracking a milk-collector vehicle, SMS messages, etc.). 

The objective of our solution is to address the problem of the basic quality of life in rural India. Given the nature of the problem (widespread, diverse, large-scale), a key factor in solving this, is community participation. Our mobile platform intends to work as a catalyst in getting the community engaged and actively resolve local issues/obstacles faced.

A measure of the participation by the community on the app and trends of various public program metrics over a period of time is a clear measure of the impact.

In order to achieve this, we intend to pilot the prototype across a few villages and observe and act upon aspects that improve the stickiness, the interactions and discussion level on the platform. Once we have the required level of participation, we will then make it available across the state of Maharashtra by the last quarter.

We also plan to conduct RCTs (Random Control Trials)  to gather robust evidence regarding this intervention.

Our goal for the 1st half of next year is to further develop the platform to cater to other stakeholders beyond the village. This could be the administration at various levels, elected representatives, corporate-social-responsibility related organizations in the region - essentially those responsible, accountable and interested in the welfare of the rural communities. We will also integrate with various digital initiatives in the public domain. This will add to the richness of content for the villager as well as inputs for better analytics by the platform.

The general rollout in Maharashtra (across 50,000 villages and 60 million people) will also give us a lot of feedback and areas to enhance prior to further rollouts in the subsequent years. Subsequently, in year 2, we plan to roll out in 4 of states where the percentage of poor is high; by year 3 we hope to roll the product across the country.

Our solution hinges on the active participation of the community on various issues. An increase in the total number of users and the level of messages being sent, participation in discussions, etc. will give us an indication that given the right kind of inputs, people and leadership are willing to step up and participate in order to improve their community. 

Further, in order to measure the impact of action, we intend to track the trends of various welfare program metrics. These trends will give us a clear indication on whether things are improving with the increased usage of the app. 

The welfare programs are aligned with various of the SDGs. For example, 

1. LPG gas based energy for cooking as opposed to using wood is a step towards clean energy.

2. Similarly, solar pumps for irrigation, solar panels for electricity are all towards renewables and sustainable energy goals.

3. Scholarships for girl-students is towards better education and  opportunities for girls and thus improving gender equality.

4. Availing of funds from the Clean India scheme for setting up toilets is towards better sanitation.

The NetO app will display metrics data for various welfare programs. The hypothesis is that by creating awareness and know-how, the community will share information and further avail greater benefits for all.  

We intend to conduct RCTs in pilot villages to establish evidence and gain deeper insights about the impact of the solution.

Our theory of change is based upon the hypothesis that people gravitate towards solving local issues that matter to them when they work as a team; there is a herd mentality, a sense of strength in numbers and a slipstream effect to the community participation, a rising tide that lifts all the boats.

It is very unlikely that a one-size-fits-all solution can be parachuted to solve problems across the country. People look for solutions in their local context. This is especially true of the poor who have multiple demands on their time and attention. Hence community-speak, word-of-mouth, local successes are big influencers.

For example, 

• socio-economic literacy initiatives that tend to be uniform and theoretical in nature might not make much of an impact compared to a visible tactical local know-how or village agent guiding them to apply for a life insurance policy at the local centre. 
• Information about a family in the neighbourhood receiving compensation for a failed crop will definitely influence a person to avail crop insurance. 

Today, there is only the  physical word-of-mouth that results in action. We feel that it need not be so in the future. Our theory is that if local data/know-how/talking points are presented in an easy-to-understand manner on a community digital forum, then they too should have a similar effect like that of word-of-mouth and hence result in a virtuous cycle participation and action and improvement. 

Our solution is essentially an IT system consisting of a web based mobile app interface, application servers, database servers running off the cloud.

There is a core analytics engine that uses data sourced from the public domain and Open APIs regarding various areas of interest (general demographics, administrative data, GPS information, public programs metrics, census socio-economic data, network infrastructure information and transient-digital data) and makes it suitably available to the user.

The platform has certain AI capabilities in terms of customizing the data based on user behaviour and interaction.

IoT is used to capture inputs from various digital computing devices such as POS, feature phones, GPS trackers used by the community services eco-system. This data is packed as notifications to the user – the local digital buzz of activities. 

NetO’s raison d'être is to catalyse rural, diverse, remote communities to learn, discuss and act upon various issues, level the playing field for the disadvantaged to be part of development trajectory and thus create an equitable society.

The core team members strongly believe in tech4good and intend to leverage their vast technology and social sector experience towards the design and implementation of this solution.

NetO has rural community participation at its heart; hence, it is by design, inclusive and also caters to a very diverse group of communities. 

Our team is also diverse; it has people from different states, speaking different languages, of different age-groups and environments working together for a common purpose. The team is led by a woman entrepreneur who has worked extensively in technology solutions and closely with disadvantaged communities across the country.

NetO’s objective is to impact the lives of communities across rural India by working as a catalyst for local active participation in problem solving. We believe that there are lot of services, useful information, local solutions out there, waiting to be leveraged and scaled by these communities to better their own standard of living. Our platform works as an enabler in doing so.

In order to determine what content results in engagement and action by the community, we intend to pilot the prototype in a few villages via known networks. User research is an activity during this pilot phase. The objective of the pilot is to seek inputs/feedback from our sample user groups and refine the platform in an iterative manner so as to ensure that there is good alignment and communities engage regularly on the platform.

Post the pilot stage, we intend to approach businesses/organizations (that have been identified) to leverage the platform for rural digital advertising/market studies, government information dissemination, allied learning (such as financial literacy modules), research reports and so on. As per the current plan, this leveraging will be the key revenue stream. We do not plan to have subscription based revenues by the rural community users.

The NetO platform consists of various modules/apps that are loosely coupled with different purposes/perspectives for various stake-holders. The primary product is meant for use by a general villager from the rural community. This B2C offering is free-of-cost.

We are currently bootstrapped and plan to raise initial funds for pilot phase and state-wide rollout via donations and grants. Post that, we plan to have multiple revenue streams such as rural advertising, 3rd party integrations for digital products, digital services, market surveys and research reports.

We are currently boot-strapped with some team members working pro-bono.