When a team of eight undergraduate engineers set out to build an AI platform for one of India’s most complex problems — welfare access — nobody expected them to move this fast.

EmpowerHub, built in just six months from engineering to design and deployment, is already being used by researchers at IIT Roorkee, IIT Kanpur and IIT Dharwad to study welfare accessibility in India.

The platform includes dedicated dashboards for researchers and policymakers, allowing them to track usage, demographics, engagement patterns, and regional disparities in scheme awareness.

The success of the project is proving that students can build public-tech infrastructure with real-world impact.

Born out of a research collaboration between IIT Roorkee, the Social Studies Foundation and Newton School of Technolo

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