How it all started
October 2026
To whoever it may concern,
Harsh and Richa both stumbled into government technology by happenstance, and both decided to stay.
Harsh joined the Ministry of Rural Development in 2016 as a data scientist in Rural Skills; Richa joined in 2020 as a product manager in Rural Roads. Neither role had existed there before. Both were experiments by their soon-to-be bosses.
One question kept pulling them back: what stops governments from using technology well, and from turning policy promises into everyday reality? Every answer widened it: from models and dashboards, to portals and design, to the people who build these systems, and finally to the organisations and incentives around them.
Working on systems for rural roads, highways, livelihoods, housing and animal husbandry gave them a front-row seat to how hard government technology can be, and how much changes when the right people get room to build. No single dashboard, portal or team would fix it.
So they started Bharat Digital, to spend the next decade working out what might shift the Overton window on sarkari tech.
One belief has only grown stronger: better technology, policies and institutions will all matter, and all of them will stand on the shoulders of public technologists, the engineers, designers and researchers who work inside government to strengthen the systems, and the people, that deliver India’s public services.
Bharat Digital is built for them, and with them.
Submitted Please
Harsh and Richa
