“The YSRCP government had deployed over 2.6 lakh volunteers without transparency and politicised the system. In contrast, the NDA dispensation is delivering pensions at people’s doorstep promptly every month — without middlemen or manipulation,” said Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu.
He declared that the village volunteer system was “wasteful expenditure”, arguing that volunteers are no longer required because pensions are being delivered “without middlemen or manipulation.” He added that his government now sends pensions to beneficiaries within three hours — without volunteers.
It would be a clean argument if not for one inconvenient detail.
During the election campaign, the very same political leadership promised the opposite — that the volunteer system would continue, and that honorariums would be doubled from ₹5,000 to ₹10,000. That promise evaporated after the election.
Within months of coming to power last year, the Chandrababu-led government has, contrary to its election promise, effectively ended the volunteer system by halting payments and announcing that services will now be delivered through village secretariats and digital platforms.
The village volunteer system was introduced by the previous government, led by YS Jagan Mohan Reddy, in 2019 with a clear objective: to build last-mile human infrastructure for welfare delivery. It was based on a simple premise — if citizens cannot reach the state, the state must reach citizens.
The volunteer system was not created to carry pensions. It was created to carry the state to people who cannot reach it.
The 2019 government order that established the village volunteer system defines its purpose unambiguously: to deliver government services at the doorstep of every eligible household, to ensure leak-proof implementation of schemes, and to identify and resolve people’s problems through the Gram Panchayat.
Each volunteer was assigned around fifty households. In tribal areas, volunteers were often the most educated youth in the habitation — the only person who could navigate online portals, receive SMS notifications, or interpret what a government dashboard meant for a family.
They were not intermediaries. They were the human interface of the state in places where the state has no physical presence.
The current government argues that volunteers are political appointees. That argument does not hold in Adivasi regions. In many hamlets, there are hardly two or three youth who have completed Class 10 and possess a smartphone. The volunteer isn’t a political choice — he or she is the only person who can operate the portal.
When your “eligible pool” is one, the idea of “political appointment” becomes absurd. By rule, a Village Volunteer had to be below 35 years of age and preferably from the same habitation. In Adivasi hamlets, this meant the volunteer was almost always the only digitally literate youth in the locality — someone the community already trusted.
Moreover, the volunteer system was not only about welfare delivery — it was also about employment. ₹5,000 a month may seem insignificant in Vijayawada or Visakhapatnam, but for an Adivasi youth in the Agency area, it is often the only dignified income available. It allowed young people to stay in their village, support agriculture at home, and still contribute to governance. In just the 11 mandals of Paderu ITDA( ASR District), there were 3,060 volunteers. The role gave them employment, identity, and a reason not to migrate to cities as menial labour.
The volunteer system was not designed for Amaravati. It was designed for Adivasi hamlets where the state disappears.
In a remote village — P Lovasingi in G Madugula — perched on a hilltop, villagers must cross a stream known to have crocodiles just to reach the nearest road. In such places, the Village Volunteer was not merely a delivery agent; he was the only bridge to the government. This is not an exception — it is the norm in many Adivasi hamlets.
For these households, governance is not a portal link or an app. It is the presence of a person who knows their names, their problems, and their paperwork. Dashboards often erase this clarity.
Digitisation has become the default solution to every welfare challenge. If there is leakage, introduce an app. If there is a delay, introduce an OTP. If there is exclusion, call it “data cleaning.”
In the last two years alone, eKYC has quietly become mandatory in almost every major welfare program — PM-Kisan, MGNREGA, PDS, pensions, and housing. These requirements are trivial for someone with a smartphone, a stable network, and digital literacy.
Try doing eKYC in hamlets where you get network only by climbing a rock and holding the phone toward the east.
In PM-KISAN, many Adivasi farmers were not given registration numbers and cannot check their payment status without travelling to the block office—a journey that, from places like Neyyalabanda village in G Madugula, requires an overnight stay. A day of work lost, money spent, and often no answer.
If village volunteers were still in place, officials could simply share the lists with them, and the volunteers would convey the status to every household. The system has the data; the office doesn’t.
Volunteers made invisible information visible.
Digital welfare needs human beings to navigate digital systems. The consequences are already visible. District administrations are now struggling to reinstate MGNREGA workers who were wrongfully deleted from the system. Without volunteers as intermediaries, workers cannot access their entitlement information, and officials have no efficient way to resolve exclusion issues at the hamlet level.
What took a volunteer a day's work now requires workers to make multiple trips to block offices—trips many cannot afford to make.
The PM JANMAN housing initiative demonstrates what happens when this human interface is missing. The Housing Department was given an Excel sheet of PVTG villages. Field teams went to the ground and could not find several habitations. Others were missing from the list entirely. Eventually, a community-based civil society organisation — the SR Shankaran Adivasi Assistance Centre — stepped in and helped register more than 600 households.
The state had data. It did not have a way to reach people.
Volunteers would have finished that work in days. They know the terrain. They know which households lack Aadhaar, who migrated for work, whose PMKISAN is stuck because of NPCI mapping, and which disabled persons need a SADARAM certificate to access pensions.
The government now argues that village secretariats will deliver all services that volunteers delivered. In non-tribal areas, this might hold. In Scheduled Areas, it collapses instantly.
Secretariat staff are tied to office-based responsibilities — biometric attendance, file movement, and service counters. Their work assumes that citizens will come to them. But in Adivasi areas, the reality is the reverse: citizens cannot reach the office. In the Alluri Sitharama Raju district, nearly 80% of the population is Adivasi. There are 430 panchayats, but only 352 Secretariats. One Secretariat often covers three to five thousand people across scattered, roadless hamlets.
A Secretariat processes files. A volunteer reaches people. Digitisation reduces discretion.
It does not reduce complexity. Complexity requires people.
In Scheduled Areas, the administration is constitutionally mandated to adapt to local realities. Removing volunteers without consulting gram sabhas — without consulting the people most affected — undermines that principle.
In 2021, LibTech India recommended a simple improvement: in tribal areas, appoint one volunteer per thirty households instead of fifty because of the terrain and habitation spread. The Tribal Welfare Secretary agreed and wrote to the Finance Department. The previous government did not implement it. The present government can.
The volunteer model was not perfect. But it worked because it was human. If political misuse was the problem, depoliticise the selection process—let gram sabhas nominate candidates and district committees verify qualifications based on objective criteria. If training was needed, provide it—establish quarterly capacity-building sessions on digital systems, welfare schemes, and complaint redressal.
If the honorarium was low, pay what was promised. Better still, integrate volunteers with Secretariats rather than replacing them: let Secretariat staff handle office-based work while volunteers maintain the last-mile human connection.
What you cannot do — not ethically, not administratively — is replace people with portals and pretend that digital access is universal.
And when governance becomes invisible, it is the most invisible people who pay the price.
Chakradhar Buddha is a Senior Researcher with LibTech India, working on digital welfare, public accountability, and tribal governance systems. LibTech India is a centre in CORD
Views expressed are the author’s own.