Build for Bharat Fellowship

I have some news.

I will not assume you’ve followed what I’ve written about all this time, but my broad theme has been that of lamenting about the status-quo and hope that young people in the sarkaar can really affect change.

I lament about fellowships where engineers who wish to do good in the world, decide to leave engineering and join these fellowships where they offer general program management expertise. I wish more engineers did good, by doing good engineering.

I lament that the greater the physical separation between the policy-maker, developer and end-user, the greater the divergence between policy objectives, IT solutioning, and ground-reality.

But I am also optimistic. I am optimistic that technology does actually improve governance when done right. I’ve seen this over and over in my time in the government. Things do change.

I know that to be a good technologist in the government, you need more than engineering skills, you need to be translators, be okay with doing little things and that change takes time.

I’ve had a fortunate journey in the government, it started by happen-stance, I got incredible mentors who gave me opportunities far beyond my rank, I had devoted colleagues and my circumstances allowed me to stay inside long-enough to see change.

A little story line:

• In 2016, when I was looking for a new job that was in the intersection of data-science and impact, my worldview was limited to NGOs and development sector organization who were hiring data scientists to analyze RCTs.
• I just didn’t think of government as a place of outsized technological impact. My journey started with happenstance, I was applying for a Data Scientist position at EPoD via IFMR, and Pratibha saw my CV and asked me to apply to a different position with the Ministry of Rural Development.

• I was hired as an experimental Data Scientist in 2016 with rural skills division at the Ministry of Rural Development. didn’t have a lot data, so I worked on helping design an ERP system + unlearning and learning about government. I had excellent mentorship and starting conditions ( Tanya Kynadi , Senthil Rajan , Simerneet Bajwa , Manish, Anisur Rahman , Anir Sir, Santhosh Mathew and primarily Alka ma’am). I went to the field consistently and was introduced to public administration and practical policy.
• I attended UChicago’s Data Science for Social Good fellowship where my understanding of public-interest data science was made. They knew what they were doing and when zoomed-out most public-sector data science interventions followed a structure. The fellowship was rigorous, structured and for me professionally, life changing.
• I had phenomenal 3-months working with Dutch Government’s version of NHAI. I worked on predicting accidents on Dutch highways to pre-emptively asking patrol cars to drive in that direction. I was able to see what is possible. Sometimes you really need to see what is possible and being done already in other parts of the country/world to get the drive to push change where you are.
• I asked Rayid Ghani , the founder of the fellowship, “I don’t think 3 months is enough to bring any change on the problems we are tackling”. He said and I paraphrase, “Ofcourse, the aim of the fellowship is not for you to solve things, it is to give you a taste so that you all eventually pursue public-interest and bring change”. Boy, he was right.
• I moved to rural-roads in 2018. They had a lot of data and problem statement. Next 3 years, I implemented the public program where an algorithm was integral to scheme and made me really understand what tech and policy together can achieve and how it can go wrong. Those 3 years remain my most rewarding years. I also don't want to work as much ever again. In all the AI hype, that case-study is years ahead of its time even now. [Paper][Talk]
• Around this time, I learned two things: First, difference between Project Management and Product Management. Second, GIS is under-utilized in public sector and open-source is all you need. We started by creating two Product Manager position for PMGSY and one GIS Specialist Deepak Gupta .
• We ended up hiring Richa Marwah for PM. I learned from her that good product-management is the most pressing skill we need to fix-gov tech.
• Having proved how data science can significantly improve governance, my boss and I pitched the head of the Ministry of Rural Development that we need a pan-Ministry interdisciplinary Data and Product team.
• 2020-2023 [Secured funding for the first year of the team, hired a good team, applied data and product interventions across NREGA, PMAY, NRLM, PMGSY etc]. We have many use-cases deployed with product, data and ML (in that order)
• And I believe strongly for that to be the case with most departments. Departments choosing to focus on AI, while they have broken products or stores of data with which decisions are not being made, are misguided willfully or otherwise.
• Moved to NHAI as Advisor-IT. Setup a similar team of Product Managers, Data Scientists and GIS folks. The team has has incredible impact over the last 2-3 years and I can say with humility that team has changed NHAI’s digital trajectory in a positive manner.
• I moved away from both products and ML and started focusing on engineering systems [led a SOTA Drone-AI project, co-wrote the design and policy for Advanced Traffic Monitoring Systems [the cameras you'll increasingly see on highways] and was part of the core team designing FasTAG 2.0 [no more toll plazas], started designing and evaluating procurement tenders etc. This is a whole different game and expertise. Engineers have an important role to play here. Gov-tech is an engineering-systems play.
• NHAI revamped its hiring policy for tech roles. Really good pay, work from home, study leaves, promotion tracks etc]. It is near optimal but still no health insurance etc. More to do, but a gold-standard for other government agencies to follow.

The reason to recap is to make two main points: Conclusion #1: Introducing people with good skills, right mindset and right starting conditions is the one of most solid interventions you can do to improve government.

Coming to these conclusion is easy, but following through on it has been hard.

Over my tenure, I’ve maybe conducted more than 200 interviews for public-tech positions. While, I have been lucky meeting and hiring some incredibly talented and nice people, it has been increasingly hard.

Most good hires (with few exceptions) were via outbound reach or people reaching out to me on my socials. That’s not sustainable at all.

This problem is widespread. Everyone I know in government who is hiring for tech positions is struggling with talent. The pay is also decent, the problem statements are challenging but we suffer from a supply-side problem. Not many people want to work in government on tech, out of per-concieved notions about #sarkari or simply not being aware of such opportunities.

Conclusion #2: Before we move on with DPI/DPG/AI, we need to fix our basics, urgently. Fixing legacy is boring, complex and wicked hard. But it needs to be done. These are hard engineering systems to solve and bandages won't fix them.

Well, we want to fix this now.

It is criminal that we struggle to fill these positions and pick sub-optimal talent to work on such mission-critical systems. Not only do we need more skilled technologists, we need more than that, we need a new breed of technologists.

We need Public technologists that are highly skilled technologists who understand the realities of public service, policy, and the unique challenges of implementing tech solutions responsibily within complex social frameworks.

And if we can’t find these people, we need to create this pipeline.

Introducing, Build for Bharat Fellowship:

The Build for Bharat fellowship aims to identify and train early-career public-interest technologists who can strengthen, modernize and humanize the digital technologies used to address India’s most urgent public and governance challenges.

We’re looking to place India’s top engineering and design students at the heart of some of the nation’s toughest governance initiatives, bridging the gap between state-of-the-art technology and genuine public service.

What does the Fellowship offer?

Real-World Problem-Solving: For 2.5 months this summer, Fellows will be placed in government departments in partnership with our program. Here, they’ll work on high-impact tech projects that either improve the lives of millions or enhance the effectiveness of government operations.

Orientation: Before and throughout your placement, you’ll undergo a rigorous orientation program—diving deep into how public systems operate, why large-scale tech solutions can fail, and how to build resilient, responsible systems that account for India’s societal and policy complexities.

Expert Mentorship: You’ll have access to one-on-one office hours with leading experts in databases, security, distributed systems, open-source technology, and design—drawn from top tech companies, academia, and the public sector.

Eligibility: Students graduating in 2025 or 2026

Stipend: Rs 40,000 per month

Source: https://bharatdigital.io/fellowship

The experience is very carefully being designed based on our own reflections of what works and doesn’t work in the government. Hence the slightly indulgent story line in an otherwise very depersonalized newsletter.

It is cohort based, so you have company, bureaucracy is easy to endure with friends.

You have mentorship from Industry experts: Because tech-mentorship is limited inside government, and this internship isn’t a compromise on technical learning. Often, technologists in the public/dev-sector turn out to be sub-par, good-intentions cannot mean a compromise on skills.

Problem statements will be neatly scoped by our core team and the partner government departments before the interns arrive. This will also ensure projects are value-aligned.

Orientation: The core of this fellowship is to shape the future public technologist. They should be thoughtful, responsible, understand public sector complexities and how tech can do good/harm in our very specific setting. It is a very specific mindset and training which you need to thrive in the public sector. It is the starting condition and that will be our MVP.

Selectivity: We are not going to chase people to join. Its going to be a very selective fellowship and you need to have some commitment to public or social-good before you join.

We are excited and nervous but we know people make things happen. And we need more people.

The fellowship will be housed under a non-for-profit initiative called Bharat Digital. The fellowship is just one of the things we are doing. Gov-tech is a wicked problem and few countries have been able really solve it. We need to tackle it at three levels: systems, culture and talent:

We are staring with Talent, but other things are cooking.

How can you help?

• If you are a student then apply!
• Share the word! https://bharatdigital.io/fellowship
• Share the inaugural post in your feeds on LinkedIn! That's where the talent is:

• If you have thoughts on what skills a public technologist should have, help us curate their Orientation curriculum.
• Volunteer with us with the fellowship (scoping, vetting etc) or with Bharat Digital in-general.
• In any way you think you can support us in partnerships, fund-raising etc.

Submitted Please

With love.