Nearly 76% of the adult population in India does not understand even the basic financial concepts. As part of government’s drive towards promotion of digital payments, MeitY sought CDFI’s support for promotion of digital payments to interact with citizens through SMS, the mobile app and an out-bound dialer. CDFI used its digital learning and outreach platform ‘Samwad’ as a base platform to run the financial literacy campaign, ‘DigiVAARTA’. Samwad is an interactive, adaptive and multilingual mobile based platform to engage and interact over mobile app, SMS and IVR.
CDFI along with MeitY conceptualised and delivered a digital learning programme ‘DigiVAARTA’. DigiVAARTA seeks to enable adaptive and interactive communication with a high degree of personalization and can engage with users through both feature phones and smart phones. The DigiVAARTA programme is expected to engage users continuously by way of interactions, stories, images, videos, discussions and polls in English, Hindi and regional languages.
The DigiVAARTA campaign was launched by Union Minister for Electronics & Information Technology, Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad on 28th September, 2018.
The DigiVAARTA platform has been developed and installed inside National Informatics Centre (NIC) and integrated with NIC SMS gateway to enable SMS interactions with citizens using a special toll-free number ‘14444’ assigned by DoT for DigiVAARTA.
The expected outcome of this project would be educating the users with topics which they are either not aware of, or have not practiced/applied till yet. Moreover, the conversations with the users would provide more insights and analytical results which would be helpful for CDFI & MeitY in their policy decisions.
Over 20 million+ SMS messages exchanged with beneficiaries through Samwad on topics such as BHIM, UPI (various modes of cashless payments) etc
