'Whatever we’re doing, I know, is not scalable,' says Swapnil Agarwal of Dhwani RIS

At the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA), Swapnil Agarwal and Sunandan Madan began working on small assignments to help digitise operational processes for grassroots organisations. Towards the end of their course, they approached the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme. At the AKRSP, the duo worked on a project in South Gujarat that covered 150 villages. Swapnil says, “Most of the field workers were occupied with data work. They hardly had time to interact with the communities they were working for.” Based on AKRSP requirements, the boys developed ICT and software solutions to ease data-intensive processes for the project.

Swapnil’s interest in rural management piqued when he saw how the adoption of technology in the social enterprise and non-profit sector was incredibly low. “Sometimes they don’t get the talent, or they’re located in low-resource areas. But their operations are fairly large. In comparison to any other organisation working in a town or city with tools like DropBox or Google Drive, these guys end up doing everything on paper.” Yet, there are many technologies that have been especially made for non-profits. “The smaller organisations have not been able to adopt them. So that was the gap we wanted to address. The major focus was data collection using local source software to save cost on paper, data entry, data cleaning and enable real-time data streaming on customised dashboards.”

“This is pretty much what we do,” Swapnil says. However, the revenue Swapnil and Sunandan received from doing these small projects wasn’t enough to sustain them. “Both of us took a job with the thought that we’d continue this in the background.” Sunandan went on to work for an NGO, and Swapnil moved to Dubai. “Three-four months down the line, both of us were still not happy with what we were doing.” Both the IRMA graduates decided to officially start Dhwani Rural Information Systems, but run it on the side. They still felt they needed stable jobs to support themselves. “But it wasn’t working. Everyone said we had to leave everything and just concentrate on Dhwani full-time.” Over the next few months, after having returned from Dubai, Swapnil, with Sunandan, networked extensively with NGOs, NPOs, social impact businesses and investors to understand the ‘social’ space in India. “What we wanted to do made sense; there was a need for it.”

In one year of functioning, Dhwani has 10 clients. “We don’t want to invent the wheel,” Swapnil says. “Accounting systems and database platform are already there. We collaborate with existing people and build applications that are appealing to the organisation. We spend a lot of time with them evaluating what they need, whether it’s ODK or cloud telephony.” In the course of their work, they also take assistance from sustainable engineers to provide better services for their clients. Nevertheless, Swapnil doesn’t have any illusions about the environment he’s working in. Dhwani runs purely on the team’s passion to saving social impact organisations’ money. He says, “A lot of IT companies don’t serve these organisations. Everyone is looking for scale. Whatever we’re doing, I know, is not scalable. It’s a service-oriented approach.” Still, there’s a silver lining in there, too: Dhwani has identified generic problems across the social sector. He says, “We’re in the process of creating a platform that can serve these common issues like data collection, data analysis, intelligent tasks and IVR technology.” One such problem that encompasses all these operations is conducting baseline surveys. Most organisations need them, and they’re still paper-intensive tasks, which Dhwani wants to change. There are also ICT solutions available in the market that Dhwani tweaks based on what an organisation needs.

The biggest problem, Swapnil says, is that standardisation is very low in India’s social sector. Most of the time is spent in data work to provide grantors with reports. Neither the funder nor the NGO gets to really interact with the community. “Our aim,” he says, “is to free workers of mechanical tasks of data reporting so they can be productive on the field.” The technological solutions that Dhwani provides also need to ensure the end user has no difficulty in using them. “Our systems need to be agnostic and accessible in regional languages. This way, even someone with secondary education can use the softwares.”

This digitisation and automation of data is an important step in creating more transparency and accountability. “We end up writing joint proposals to convince grantors to provide resources for information and communication technologies. But it’s an area we always struggle in,” says Swapnil. Big funders, according to Swapnil, have high expectations of an NGO. But smaller ones genuinely believe all operations can be covered on an Excel sheet. On the other hand, whenever the government is involved, it’s another ballgame. “First, it’s bureaucracy. Second, it’s an issue of management. The workers feel we’re ‘monitoring’ them when we develop services to increase accountability.” Dhwani faced this problem when they were asked to assist with the Mother and Child Tracking System for the Madhya Pradesh government. “At that time, the IPS officer pushed for it. But she was relocated, and the new officer was least interested.”

Dhwani’s work requires inordinate handholding. “Sometimes we end up redefining their processes and operations. So we end up spending a lot of time with them, and we’ve not been remunerated accordingly, but that is okay with us. If we don’t do it, nobody else will.”

Swapnil concludes by saying, “We call ourselves developing professionals because we do more than just provide ICT solutions. Most existing IT solutions are not built by people who understand development – they haven’t seen rural reality. We don’t believe in pushing solutions, but spending time with people to understand what they truly need.”