Soch 5.0 Delhi Technological University

ArthSaathi by Soch 5.0 DTU — Rewiring India’s Street Vendor Economy Through Voice-First Fintech

The National Winner deck that rebuilds PM SVANidhi’s broken delivery through a feature-phone-ready fintech OS for India’s 10 million street vendors.

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1. About the Case Competition

Soch 5.0 is Enactus Delhi Technological University’s flagship social entrepreneurship case competition — one of India’s most respected stages for impact-driven business strategy. Team STRATEGIX from IIM Rohtak (Anuj Shivhare, Aryan Rungta, Gaurav Porwal, and Gautam Aggarwal) claimed the National title with ArthSaathi — a fintech ecosystem designed to bridge India’s 10 million urban street vendors into formal credit, digital payments, and gender-inclusive infrastructure.

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2. Problem Statement Overview

India’s PM SVANidhi scheme offers collateral-free ₹10,000 loans to street vendors — but execution has broken down badly. 28.3% of vendors faced loan disbursal delays, 9.8% were stalled by bureaucracy, and 40% of small vendors faced active eviction drives. The deeper failure is structural: vendors lack smartphones, digital literacy, and trust in formal systems. Existing fintech players — Paytm, PhonePe, Avanti — solve payments or lending in isolation. None addresses the full lifecycle of a vendor attempting to enter the formal economy from scratch.

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3. What This Winning Deck Covers

The deck opens with a SVANidhi implementation failure timeline before landing on ArthSaathi’s core identity: not another payments app, but a full execution OS for vendor financial inclusion. The standout design choice is ArthSaathi LitePay — UPI 123PAY integration for feature phones — eliminating the smartphone dependency that every competitor assumes and no one has solved.

The framework stack is exceptional for a social impact deck. The team deploys a PIRATE metrics framework (AARRR) to map the vendor lifecycle from acquisition to revenue, an AIDA adoption funnel for field acquisition strategy, and a PESTLE heat snapshot to contextualize macro risks. Three named vendor behavioral personas — “Doubtful Devi,” “Keen Kishore,” and “Busy Bhaiya” — drive segment-specific product decisions rather than generic user research. SheMarkets — a women-first financial inclusion model with dedicated vending zones, reserved micro-credit lines, digital literacy bootcamps, and police helpline integration — elevates the deck from fintech to systemic gender equity. The phased rollout plan and stakeholder mapping across SBI, NGOs, ULBs, and government anchor the execution blueprint with real-world credibility.

Five tactical takeaways:

• Named behavioral personas beat demographics in social impact decks — design for their specific friction, not a generic user
• Infrastructure-first thinking wins: if your solution assumes a smartphone, you’ve already excluded your user
• Revenue model credibility matters even in social entrepreneurship — six diversified streams signals scale viability to judges
• The PIRATE framework applies to vendor onboarding just as cleanly as SaaS growth
• Pair GTM with city-level budget breakdowns — vague “metro pilots” lose to a ₹3.4 Cr allocation table

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4. The Numbers

India: 10M urban street vendors; 20.8L SVANidhi beneficiaries. 28.3% faced loan delays; 40% faced eviction. Vendors contribute ~2.5% of GDP. 46% of vendor transactions now digital; 40%+ Tier 3–6 consumers pay digitally daily. SheMarkets pilot: ₹3.4 Cr across 5 cities targeting 4,600+ women vendors. Y1 target: 20,000+ vendors onboarded; credit growth ₹10K → ₹25K. Long-term: 7M vendors, 14-language voice support, 90% micro-credit repayment rate.

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5. Who Should Study This Deck

Students targeting Enactus, social entrepreneurship, and financial inclusion case competitions will find the framework density here exceptional — it’s a masterclass in applying product thinking to a public policy problem. Consulting aspirants prepping for ESG or fintech-angle cases will sharpen their stakeholder mapping and phased implementation instincts significantly. CaseBuzz has more social impact and policy strategy decks to round out your prep library.

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6. Related Decks on CaseBuzz

• Paramarsh 2.0 — IIM Raipur: Project Udaan Policy Framework — Policy design and phased implementation framework; direct structural complement to ArthSaathi’s rollout approach.
• Parivartan by IIM Ahmedabad — IIM-A’s social impact competition; essential reading for understanding what judges reward in high-stakes social entrepreneurship decks.
• GNFC Neem Project — Profit with Purpose Strategy — Social enterprise with sustainable revenue modeling; complements ArthSaathi’s multi-stream monetization thinking.
• PolicyKraft — IIM Kozhikode National AI Governance Strategy Framework — AI and governance policy framing; useful for understanding how to pitch technology-policy integration to judges.
• BTribe Launchpad 25 — Startup lifecycle deck with strong PIRATE/growth metrics framing; pairs naturally with ArthSaathi’s vendor acquisition and retention architecture.