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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.