Saathi

Government services in India are spread across dozens of separate apps and portals, each with its own login, its own language support and its own forms. The project site lists thirty-six of them, from UMANG and DigiLocker to e-Shram and Passport Seva.

That structure assumes a citizen already knows which department owns their problem — which, for most people, is the hardest part of the task. And a convincing fake portal is often one search result away.

The primary user reads English as a second language, if at all, and may share one low-cost Android phone with the rest of the household. The prototype's persona, Rakesh Verma from Kanpur Nagar in Uttar Pradesh, is managing a birth certificate, a health card and a farm-support registration at the same time.

The interface therefore has to work in the user's own script, survive a change of user between sessions, and explain where things stand without assuming any knowledge of how government works.

Saathi is a front door, not a replacement: it is designed to sit on rails India has already built — Aadhaar for identity, DigiLocker for documents, UPI for payments, Bhashini for language — rather than beside them. The integrations are conceptual, and the project states that it is not affiliated with those platforms.

The interface was designed in Devanagari and English together from the first frame, so neither reads as an afterthought. Devanagari needs more vertical room than Latin at the same optical size; designing for it first set the line heights and card proportions, and the other scripts inherited a layout that already had room.

The information architecture was reorganised around life events — a birth, a harvest, a first job, a pension — so a citizen never has to know which department owns a service in order to start it. The mapping from need to department is the product's job.

Each of these is visible in the prototype, and each is carried by the design system rather than decided screen by screen.

Home leads with identity, then what needs attention, then the four things people come to do: apply, pay, find documents, get help. Five destinations sit in the bottom bar — Home, Explore, Saathi, Track and Me — with the assistant raised in the centre because asking in your own words is the fastest route to any of the others.

The working prototype covers onboarding with language choice, home, the assistant, service discovery, application tracking and a full application start for a birth certificate. Switching to Hindi, Bengali or Tamil changes every string and keeps every layout.

Designing for a second language changes the layout, not just the strings. Committing to Devanagari first forced decisions about density and rhythm that would have been painful to retrofit.

It also clarified how much of accessibility is editorial rather than technical — the words on a status pill matter as much as its contrast. The next step would be testing those words with the people they are written for; the header's 36px icon buttons are also below the 44px touch-target guideline and would be the first thing to fix.