Launching Pravasi: Chalo Network’s Monthly Newsletter
By Varun Aggarwal
Back in 2019, two years into our journey, it became clear that to progress our research and advocacy work, we needed to be on the ground in both rural and urban areas- observing, collaborating, and building. We started with a desk on a construction site in Thane, surveying and interacting with migrants. Along with this, we tried pushing a well-intentioned digital financial app on a large construction workforce of migrants from more than 10 states. Those were challenging months as we struggled to break through to workers who were desperate to get paid and leave as soon as possible — to another site, profession, or home. The only universally popular service was our Aadhaar correction/updation offering; from helpers to site engineers, everyone wanted their Aadhaar fixed.
I personally filled in at least 50 tedious forms, while shuttling workers to nearby Aadhaar centres and bank branches. But before we could wrap our time on the site, the 2020 COVID-induced crisis was upon us. Overnight, our service delivery operations became relief operations. The people we spent our best four months with, drinking tea, discussing smartphone brands and optimal savings plans (which no one signed up for), were suddenly hungry, petrified and now desperate to just go home.
Suddenly, we had the attention of migrant workers (and even their elusive contractors), service providers and funders. We conducted numerous rapid surveys telephonically to analyse the nature and scale of the distress. We seeded a geospatial database to connect relief needs with relief providers. A new set of service delivery challenges came to the fore: the lack of real-time data about where migrants were located in and around cities (more often than not in the peripheral worksites and informal settlements); the complete lack of suitable state infrastructure and understanding of these suddenly very visible citizens (lack of PDS shops near migrant settlements for instance); the supply-demand mismatch (need for cooked food while the supply focused on grains and sugars with no cooking oil).
When combined with the endless constraints and distress of the pandemic, the situation became very challenging. We fielded 3 am calls from desperate contractors with 50 hungry workers confined to a barren piece of land, or spouses and mothers of stranded workers pleading for assistance. It was a harrowing experience for all concerned. Unfortunately, many of our assumptions and priors about the last mile gaps and challenges faced by migrants were confirmed.
In the months following the initial lockdown, we reformulated our service delivery model to our updated experiences and learnings. The Chalo Network was born. Our model won the Equal Cities Challenge organised by the Nudge Foundation and a fruitful learning partnership with Dvara Trust came into being. We started pilots in several source regions of NCR/Delhi, training and placing CSCs/banking agents and community influencers to deliver financial, social welfare and identity services. We iterated ruthlessly, making and correcting errors, obsessing about effective last mile approaches, and optimising the lives of agents so they can better service their migrant customer bases.
While we saw a steady rise in transactions and customers, agent sustainability was a massive challenge. This was largely down to a lack of suitable products and services for the considerable agent ecosystem along with inadequate commission structures for government services. As the Delta wave came, our agent network joined the national vaccination push, registering and nudging thousands of migrants and non-migrants alike on the CoWin platform.
Today, almost two and half years into our operational journey, financial sustainability and building a great product roster for our agent network remain our primary challenges. Thanks to JP Morgan’s Force for Good program, we are well underway towards automating our agent program with a customised remote training and management solution. We have partnerships with last-mile organisations throughout India, working with migrants and informal workers. We have also developed a novel migration credit product and plan to extend our services for Indian overseas workers in the coming year. Chalo Network is currently present in the source regions of Shivpuri, Tikamgarh in Madhya Pradesh, Madhubani in Bihar and in destination regions of Delhi NCR, Thane and Ahmedabad. We also have expansion initiatives in Hyderabad, Bangalore and Odisha and have served almost 30,000 customers overall.
Through our experiences, we have learned a lot and we are excited to share Chalo Network’s journey and learnings with you. We feel that we have developed a fair understanding of the migrant ecosystem. We will continue reflecting and learning with more experiences on the ground.
While migrants continue to face deep distress and exclusions, especially in urban destinations, a lot of great progress has been made by governments and civil society alike. We want to highlight the advances, learnings, challenges and insights of the ecosystem in the upcoming editions of this monthly newsletter called Pravasi.
We hope you join us in our journey.
The Chalo Network is India Migration Now’s (IMN) attempt to execute, test and scale solutions for low-income migrants, their households, and communities. The IMN team has established itself as an important research and advocacy engine, merging migration studies with research, policy, and programs in the Indian context.
