Ease of Doing Business for MSMEs: For-profit social enterprise Haqdarshak, which provides access to government welfare schemes to small businesses and individuals, on Monday announced Yojana card for small businesses and informal workers. The first-of-its-kind physical card will help its users discover and access government and private welfare services via assisted or self-service channels. The card aims to get 400 million informal workers and 50 million micro enterprises into the social welfare and financial inclusion net.
The card stores required information about the individual and company to be eligible for various services. While the self-service channel allows users to access schemes via a QR code, through the assisted-technology model, the company is aiming to tap feature phone and smartphone users through its network of over 20,000 field agents, predominantly women, who earn an income from the service delivery.
The card will primarily target low-income families, who earn less than Rs 1,000 per day, especially construction workers, factory workers, sanitation workers, gig economy workers, and street vendors, apart from micro-businesses with an annual turnover of less than Rs 10 lakh.
Haqdarshak’s MSME platform currently helps businesses access over 200 schemes related to funding, subsidies, licensing, and registrations such as Udyam registration, ECLGS, PM SVANidhi, CGTMSE, and more. The company said the card will create a unique identification code for the user to help solve issues including unintended exclusion, grievance redressal, and documentation gaps while applying for schemes.
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“The Yojana Card is a single channel for welfare-schemes eligibility and will eventually be linked to a bank. It will be a game-changing product in solving access problems for social protection. With this launch, we aim to target the 500 million informal workers and micro-businesses under an active social protection net. The launch is also a new phase of growth for Haqdarshak after six years of proving the concept and reaching over 20 lakh families across 24 states in the country,” said Aniket Doegar, CEO & Co-Founder, Haqdarshak.
The company said over the next two months, the card will be available at Haqdarshak’s select brick and mortar setups called Yojana Kendras for walk-in services. Haqdarshak said it has impacted over 2.04 million Indians by unlocking welfare benefits worth Rs 4,000 crore. The startup is backed by investors including chemical manufacturing company Deepak Nitrite’s Chairman Deepak Mehta’s Family Office, 3i Partners, Beyond Capital Fund, Upaya Social Ventures, and Acumen.