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

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.