Billions Lost in Translation: How India’s Welfare Schemes Fail Without Accessibility — and How KalyanSarathi Helps

Despite India’s vast network of government welfare schemes — spanning healthcare, education, food security, and employment — a large share of the country’s most vulnerable citizens remain excluded from their benefits. The central and state governments together spend over ₹5 lakh crore annually on such schemes, yet a significant portion of this investment fails to translate into real-world impact.

Studies by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) and evaluations by NITI Aayog consistently point to a troubling pattern: a combination of unawareness, bureaucratic complexity, and language barriers leads to substantial underutilization of welfare resources. For instance, the PM Kisan Yojana — aimed at providing income support to small and marginal farmers — has seen cases where ineligible recipients gained access while eligible farmers were left behind, often due to documentation issues or lack of awareness. Similarly, over ₹13,000 crore allocated under MGNREGA remained unutilized in 2022 due to poor information dissemination and procedural delays.

This inefficiency isn’t just a bureaucratic problem — it represents a staggering loss of public money and missed opportunities to improve lives. In many rural and semi-urban regions, citizens are either unaware of the schemes that apply to them, or find themselves overwhelmed by fragmented websites, confusing eligibility rules, or the need to navigate government portals in English. For those who are less digitally literate or only speak local languages, accessing welfare becomes a near-impossible task.

These systemic gaps create space for middlemen who exploit people seeking benefits, further eroding trust in the system and adding hidden costs to what should be free public services. While the government continues to launch new schemes and increase allocations, the absence of an accessible, user-centric interface at the grassroots level means much of this effort goes to waste.

To address this, emerging digital tools like KalyanSarathi offer a promising way forward. By simplifying access to information and guiding people through eligibility and application processes in Hindi and English, such solutions can dramatically reduce friction in the last mile of welfare delivery. Empowering citizens with the ability to understand and claim what is rightfully theirs isn’t just a matter of efficiency — it’s a matter of equity and justice.

Unless we bridge the accessibility gap, even the most well-intentioned schemes risk becoming footnotes in policy documents. India doesn’t need more schemes — it needs smarter ways to ensure that the existing ones actually reach the people they were designed for.