One door to every government service.

Research · cities, small towns and villagesStep 1 of 7 · Weeks 1–3 · 3 frictions · 4 personas

Language, trust, and not knowing where to start.

A citizen who wants to register a birth, claim a pension or check a land record deals with dozens of apps and portals, each with its own login, language and idea of a form. The services exist — but finding the real one, not a lookalike or a middleman, takes confidence, data and patience that the people who most need help often do not have. In research the same three frictions came up again and again: language, trust, and not knowing where to start.

1. 01

   Language

   Services that do not speak the language of the person using them.

2. 02

   Trust

   Finding the real service — not a lookalike or a middleman.

3. 03

   Where to start

   Dozens of apps and portals, each with its own login and its own idea of a form.

Over several weeks of conversations, four people came into focus.

• RV Rakesh Verma, 34 Kanpur · Tier-2 Shopkeeper. Smartphone-confident, but burned by fake-portal scams.
• SD Sunita Devi, 29 Bihar · Rural Farmer. Low literacy, shares one phone with the family.
• VS Vikram Singh, 68 Chennai · Senior Retired teacher. Patient, careful, prefers Tamil.
• AS Ananya Sharma, 26 Bengaluru · Urban Analyst. Fluent in English, zero patience for friction.

UMANG · the government’s own unified appStep 2 of 7 · Week 3 · Brief set

Not how many services fit — how it feels to use one.

UMANG, the government’s own unified app, set the brief. Saathi does not compete on the length of the list; it competes on what happens when a real person opens it.

Three lenses · ten principlesStep 3 of 7 · Week 4 · Framed

Lives, not departments.

Services were reframed through three lenses, under ten written principles.

• Life moments
• Needs
• Entitlements

1. 01

   Lives, not departments

   Organise around life moments, not government silos.

2. 02

   Vernacular-first

   Designed in Hindi and Tamil first, then ported to English.

3. 03

   Trust in 5 seconds

   Verification, .gov.in signals and calm authority, up front.

4. 04

   Status is sacred

   Always show where a thing is, who has it, and by when.

5. 05

   Proxy is normal

   Helping a parent or child is a first-class action, not a hack.

6. 06

   Voice is first-class

   Every field can be spoken, not typed.

7. 07

   Receipts everywhere

   Every action ends with proof you can keep.

8. 08

   Density is the enemy

   Few choices per screen. Space is a feature.

9. 09

   Inclusive by default

   Built for the lowest-literacy, lowest-bandwidth user first.

10. 10

    Calm authority

    Official, never cold. Reassuring, never childish.

Structure · version one → Saathi 2.0Step 4 of 7 · Week 5 · Apply tab replaced

“Apply for what?”

Version one had an Apply tab — but a bare Apply tab asks “apply for what?”. In Saathi 2.0 the assistant sits at the centre of five tabs: tell it what you need, in any words, and it routes you.

Saathi AI · plan, steps, consent, receiptStep 5 of 7 · Weeks 6–7 · 4 patterns · failures designed

An agent that shows its work.

Saathi AI is designed as an agent, not a chatbot. Four patterns keep the citizen in control — here they are in the prototype, on a real request: registering a daughter’s birth.

1. 1

   A plan card

   Before anything happens, every step is listed with the official service behind it.

   
2. 2

   Verifiable tool steps

   Each step reports what it found and where — DigiLocker, e-District, NHM — so it can be checked.

   
3. 3

   A consent gate

   It names the data, the recipient and how long access lasts. Nothing is sent until the citizen says yes.

   
4. 4

   A receipt

   Every outcome ends in a reference number, a named officer and an expected date.

   

Failure is designed too — every request can end in one of these, and each has its own screen:

• Not understood
• Not eligible
• Service down
• Needs a human

17 languages · 11 scripts · WCAG 2.1 AAStep 6 of 7 · Week 8 · Accessible by default

Seventeen languages. Built for the lowest-literacy user first.

• 17languages
• 11scripts
• 200msto swap the whole UI

Hindi, Bengali and Tamil were written first. Indic text gets a 1.8 line height, and every text colour is contrast-tested against WCAG 2.1 AA from the design tokens — from 4.70:1 to 19.41:1.

• Voice on every field
• Slow mode
• Larger text
• Read-aloud
• Family proxy mode
• Status never shown by colour alone

Bharat Precision design systemStep 7 of 7 · Weeks 9–10 · 42 processes · 6 flows · 15 consoles

Bharat Precision: colour for meaning, on white.

Geist for Latin, Anek for Indic headlines, Noto Sans for Indic body text. Kolam linework for texture, guilloche security print for anything official, and motion that stays under 300 milliseconds and can always be interrupted. 42 government processes are modelled on their real portals, six key flows are designed end to end, and fifteen department consoles cover the other side of the counter.

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