What is Bharat Bal Setu?
Bharat Bal Setu is a Digital Public Infrastructure approach to addressing access to Counselling and Justice at scale in India. Its first focal point is children aged 9-18 across society. It’s aim is primarily two-fold:
Empower children with direct, simplified agency and choice to access, engage and interact with current ecosystem resources
Support the existing robust ecosystem by building rails that can help them work at national scale with less dependency on funding and human resources.
What is Digital Public Infrastructure?
DPI is an approach to solving societal problems at national scale. It was at the forefront of India’s G20 presidency and remains one of its most powerful soft exports to the world. Common examples of DPI include Aadhar (digital identity), UPI (payments), and Diksha (education). It is also being used to address e-commerce, climate change, social benefit transfers, health and more. It is now time to apply the same lens to Justice and Care for minors. The same team that was part of building all the aforementioned architecture is also building Bharat Bal Setu.
DPI is not an end-to-end solution - nor is it a new organisation, policy, or think tank. It is also not a ‘digital’ view at what is fundamentally a human-centric sensitive issue.
DPI creates nationwide rails majorly using existing technology and policy infrastructure, to support organisations and professionals already at the frontline of these services.
Think of UPI: it is simply a payment rail that made interoperable instant payments between existing payment providers (such as banks, wallets) to customers (individuals or platforms) smoother even for the last mile users (who don’t need smartphones or connectivity or even an understanding of english or finance to utilise the features!).
Similarly, Bharat Bal Setu would simply create a bridge between India’s existing resources across Justice and Care for our children to access with direct, simplified Choice and Agency to increase equitable adoption and facilitate scale at unprecedented rates.
The infrastructure rails built is for every organisation and professional to use in their own work, in their own way, under their own name, to help them reach national scale faster with minimal extra funding or human resources.
What do you mean by Access to Counselling and Justice?
Adolescent life is marked with a variety of changes (physical, mental, emotional) in the lives of children. These natural difficulties are compounded by a variety of outside stimuli that may affect or restrict their development. These can be broadly covered under two categories:
Mental and emotional distress: due to factors such as stress about exams, anxiety, depression, parental divorce, parental substance abuse, etc.
Physical distress: due to crimes such as child labour, abuse, marriage, and trafficking etc.
The first can be addressed through access to, and support from, licensed child-counsellors and the second, through access to registered NGOs for children working in different aspects of Justice.
BBS creates a pan-India discovery and fulfilment network to help children access these resources to keep themselves healthy and safe.
This network would incorporate existing:
Helplines (voice-based help)
Licensed therapists and registered NGOs (for anonymised, online support)
In-person sessions (for physical interventions)
Why children aged 9-18? and How?
BBS will initially work with children ages 9-18. It is starting at age 9, simply because by then children have developed a sense of individuality and are more likely to benefit from the direct agency and choice accessible through BBS rails. In time, BBS can work with community members to expand the scope to include assisted access for younger children, as well as accommodate young adults (18-21) still under state protection for various reasons.
Over 80% of children (both rural and urban) have access to phones [2]. This is also the basis of the Diksha DPI live pan-India through the Ministry of Education where students can scan a QR code on their textbooks to access further resources.
Primarily, BBS will leverage this access to devices to provide direct agency to minors in line with the Personal Data Protection Bill and best practices governing interactions with children to monitor implementation of existing policies and mandates even in last mile situations which is often difficult in offline modes.
Secondarily, BBS will also be available in assisted mode through last mile Asha workers, counters at railway stations, caregivers of differently abled children, individual therapists, and proactive professionals working with shelter homes and juvenile detention centres, to allow children from all backgrounds to have access to the nationwide rails.
What is Direct, Simplified Agency and Choice?
BBS empowers children with direct agency to access resources for counselling and justice, equipping them with the ability to reach out to a wide network of licensed community participants operating in the child's best interests. It simplifies the expectation from the child to 'know' who to contact or where to go, while empowering them with choice to access the resources in a manner they feel most comfortable with. This reduces the burden on their caregivers to have the knowledge, understanding, courage, financial ability, and resources (time, effort, travel) to get their children help. It also prevents a child from living in difficult situations without access to outside help if their primary caregivers themselves are enablers or perpetrators of abuse.
Key features:
anonymous, direct access
to conversational style information
in age appropriate manners
sourced from the community
available 24/7
in all Indian languages
through multi-modal applications (including websites and portals of existing NGOs, schools, police stations, frontline champions etc.)
How will this Support the Existing Robust Ecosystem?
BBS is not a new application or NGO or portal; it is simply a bridge for existing community members (organisations and professionals) to use to access the children in more sustainable and scalable ways:
through real time translations into all Indian languages
pan-India discovery and fulfilment networks with other NGOs and professionals for counselling and justice that can help handle different aspects of the resolution
direct access to affected children to provide your specialised resources
and for children to have direct, simplified access to all resources built for them through:
24/7 support through relatable AI characters to help them understand and navigate adolescent life (anxiety, body image issues, parental divorce, abuse etc.) by acting as a trusted source of truth
curated, filtered convergence points of organisations and professionals working to support them along with ability to engage and interact with them
anonymous primary access - age appropriate, context-specific, any language, any device, any mode - to build trust and confidence
pan-India ecosystem support from start to end of all problems
while ensuring the burden on existing police-legal resources is minimised so that they can focus on high urgency cases by:
creating a 5-layer resolution system to ensure that every child has access to whatever help they may need, and
only cases that can’t be solved at one level filter down to the next level (either by the nature of the case itself, or because of context-specific failures)
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