Facilitating information flow and management of public schemes for citizen empowerment and good governance in backward districts of India.

Digital Empowerment Foundation launched Soochna Seva in collaboration with the European Union in January 2014 with an aim to spread awareness about existing public schemes, using ICT/non-ICT tools, among the deprived sections and enable them to derive benefits from the same. In addition to empowering the masses with information, Soochna Seva has set its focus on capacity building of the local communities, groups and citizens and advance cooperation between the stakeholders and local administration to develop an operative framework for public scheme information dissemination and entitlement.

This initiative is further expected to strengthen the governance structure at district administration level and below where — due to difficult social, economic, geographical, geo-physical, poor development and weak infrastructures — it has become extremely difficult for the public authorities and agencies to reach out to the maximum (deserving) beneficiaries.

The various objectives of Soochna Sevan include:

• Addressing the larger issues of poverty, social exclusion and inequity of marginalised groups through information on public schemes and entitlement
• Promoting and strengthening good governance practice by local administration
• Providing enhanced channels and points for information services delivery to target groups at their doorsteps towards informed choices, decisions and entitlement benefits
• Facilitating an integrated district-level public scheme information management framework
• Developing a citizen engagement and entitlement mechanism in public scheme administering process to bridge administration-citizen network deficits

So far, more than 60 thousand individuals have already benefited from the project, and an estimated 4,00,000 individual are further expected to benefit during the project period.