The Business of Ending Generational Poverty in India: Haqdarshak!

<p>Creating a compelling strategy is step number one for every business. But almost no one gets it right on the first try. Aniket Doegar and “Guns” Ganapathy, co-founders of the Indian social enterprise Haqdarshak, pivoted multiple times while remaining focused on financial sustainability and their mission: eliminating generational poverty in India through access to social security.</p><p>India, with a population of 1.4 billion, has about a billion people dependent on some form of social security, according to <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/aniket-doegar-56458245/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Aniket Doegar</a>. And India has over 20,000 government programs. But most families are accessing only a tiny percentage of the programs they’re eligible for. “An urban family living in cities like Delhi and Bombay is eligible for about 25 to 30 programs, and all these families at any given point of time are not accessing more than 10 percent of them,” explains Doegar. That’s the problem <a href="https://haqdarshak.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Haqdarshak</a> wants to solve — how to enable people in need to access the life-changing benefits they deserve.&nbsp;</p><p>From the very beginning, Haqdarshak’s strategy was focused on generating revenue so the company wouldn’t be dependent on handouts or grants in the traditional nonprofit model. “It was almost an article of faith for me that scale can be achieved and lots of social problems can be addressed by thinking through a revenue model, by having financial sustainability built into the DNA of the organization,” says <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/prganapathy/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Ganapathy</a>, who is not only a co-founder of Haqdarshak, but also its first investor, and formerly Stanford Seed’s regional director for South Asia.</p><p>The two assumed that building a platform for end users to access benefits would be too expensive and that government contracts would be more financially reliable. Unfortu