Globally, an entrepreneur is a person willing to bear the risk of a new venture, an innovator who markets the innovations, develops new goods or processes according to market demands. Whereas a social entrepreneur is an individual having innovative ideas to the community’s most pressing needs. They are passionate, dealing with social issues and offering solutions for wide-scale change.
SoochnaPreneurs are youths & young entrepreneurs, took up Soochnapreneur Social Business Franchisee for the well-being of the community. Acting as local service providers, soochnapreneurs will serve various information services needs of citizen consumers, especially at Village, Panchayat and Block levels in 6 district of India. The program is a move to spread the ethos of entrepreneurship amongst Indian youth especially the marginalized.
The proposed action intends to deploy and run an integrated information services delivery and citizen entitlement framework in 5 backward districts namely Ranchi (Jharkhand), West Champaram (Bihar), Guna (MP), Barmer (Rajasthan) and Bargarh (Orissa). There are 250 such districts designated as backward by the planning commission. However, these districts are backward in India in terms of key social and economic indicators. For instance, the 200 backward districts, identified by the Planning Commission of India to implement the NREGA Scheme are identified to have special problems. They are the least developed areas of the country comprising mostly marginal farmers and forest dwellers. In many of these districts poverty has increased despite consistent focus of several poverty eradication programmes. Governance has little or no presence in most of these districts. The socio economic indicators of most of these districts are generally below the national average.
The proposed action is considered relevant in 25 blocks of the selected districts strengthening and democratising the environment of public schemes information dissemination, services and final entitlement gains for focused groups and beneficiaries using mobile devises equipped with connectivity and other tools.
This will be enabled through the development of India’s first Public Schemes & Entitlement App (titled ‘Soochna Seva App in Hindi Language), deployment of mobile devices (smartphones and tablets deployed with Qualcomm Snapdragon processors) equipped with public schemes information and content and final delivery of information services (forms, print out, photography, consulting, printing, scanning, uploading, downloading and others ) to be serviced to rural citizens on a sustainable basis through Soochna Seva Kendras (Info Service Centres), both fixed and mobile centres (50 fixed and 50 mobile centres), equipped with supporting ICT devices (printer-scanner-photocopier).
The will run by 100 self-employed SoochnaPreneurs (Soochna Sevaks) reaching out to servicing approx. 25000 households and approx. 50000 individual beneficiaries with e-governance and citizen and digital services in 3 years’ time frame.