Typically 3 to 6 weeksFeasibility, coverage and routing, staffing ratios, cost-per-touchpoint modelling, and a costed operating plan.
Programs don’t fail in the design room. They fail in the last mile.
We build and run field operations: the people, tools and discipline that turn a plan into work on the ground. We run it for you, or build it and hand it to your team.
60+Districts
14+States
110+Field personnel deployed
28MField data points
Most field programs are well designed and badly executed.
Design gets months of attention. Execution gets a hiring requisition and an app. When a program underperforms, the cause is almost always one of four things.
- 01
Hiring for availability, not fit
Roles go to whoever is reachable before launch. First-ninety-day attrition runs at 40 to 60% on programs we’re brought in to fix, and every exit breaks community trust.
- 02
Tools chosen before the workflow
Forms built for the dashboard, not for someone in a courtyard with 12% battery and no signal. The data comes back slow, incomplete or quietly invented.
- 03
Supervision that makes quality impossible
One supervisor to 30 staff across 200 km is an org chart, not a supervision system.
- 04
Data that arrives too late to act on
Four to six weeks late, field data becomes reporting instead of management. It should change next week, not explain last quarter.
Each of these is fixable. None of them is fixable once you are already in the field.
Field operations is a discipline with a sequence.
Skip a stage and you pay for it later at three times the cost. Every engagement runs this way, whether it lasts six weeks or four years.
Diagnosis and handover are where we differ most.
- 01
Where most stop shortDiagnose
Two to four weeks on the ground before any commitment on scale: terrain, travel time, language, seasonality, access. You get the written diagnostic even if you take it elsewhere.
- 02
Design
Coverage, routing, cadence, span of control, escalation and cost per touchpoint. This is where the program’s real unit economics get decided.
- 03
Staff
Roles built from the workflow, local sourcing, structured vetting, and training with certification before anyone deploys. We hire locally by default.
- 04
Equip
Offline-first data capture, devices, connectivity and SOPs written for the person doing the work, not the person reading the dashboard.
- 05
Deploy
Phased rollout: a reference implementation in a bounded geography, stabilised and measured before scale.
- 06
Assure
Back-checks, spot audits, GPS and timestamp validation, and a weekly correction loop. Quality is a running process, not a final report.
- 07
Where most stop shortTransfer
Documented SOPs, trained supervisors and a defined handover point. You should be able to run this without us, and we plan for that from week one.
Six ways to bring us in.
Each stands alone, and each connects to the rest of the model.
Typically 3 to 6 weeks
Sourcing to certificationRole architecture, local sourcing, vetting, training, certification and retention design. 82% retention past twelve months.
Tool-agnosticOffline data collection, device management, supervisor dashboards and quality flags, integrated with the MIS you already own.
We run the fieldSOPs, supervision cadence, escalation, field payroll and welfare, and daily operational management.
Also standaloneIndependent back-checks, audit sampling, anomaly detection and a documented correction loop, even over teams we didn’t recruit.
Your team, our playbookA defined handover with a competency checklist, not a document dump. We succeed when we’re no longer needed.
Hire us to run it, or to make sure you never need to hire anyone to run it. We’ll tell you which one your program needs.
What the first year looks like.
Real durations from real programs. A state-wide rollout in six weeks is a launch, not an operation.
Weeks 1 to 4 · Field immersion and constraint analysis. Delivers a written diagnostic and a costed plan.
Weeks 4 to 8 · Roles, sourcing, vetting and training. Delivers a certified field cohort and full SOP set.
Weeks 8 to 20 · One bounded geography, fully instrumented, corrected weekly. Delivers real cost and quality data.
Weeks 20 to 40 · Replication across geographies, supervisor layer built out, quality systems at volume.
Week 40+ · We keep running operations, or hand over to your team over 8 to 12 weeks.
What we hold ourselves to, publicly.
Hold us to these, and ask anyone else you evaluate to publish theirs.
Data quality
- Minimum 10% independent back-check on all data.
- GPS and timestamp validation on 100% of submissions.
- Error rates published monthly, including when they’re bad.
- Any data failing audit is re-collected at our cost.
Field staff
- Wages at or above state minimum plus 20%.
- Paid within 7 days of cycle close, without exception.
- Written contracts in the local language.
- Travel, data and device costs never deducted from pay.
Safety, consent and privacy
- A safety protocol for every geography, reviewed seasonally.
- A named escalation contact reachable 24/7.
- Informed consent in the respondent’s language, before collection.
- You own the data. We delete our copies at handover.
Three programs, three different problems.
Figures in brackets are placeholders. Verify with delivery leads and get client naming permission before publishing.
Placeholder · UnsplashSBI Youth for India
42%drop in mid-fellowship attrition
- Context
- Thirteen-month rural fellowships across 18 states.
- Constraint
- Placement quality decided everything, with no common standard across dozens of host organisations.
- What changed
- Selection rebuilt on field-predictive criteria, host readiness checked before placement, a common check-in cadence.
Placeholder · UnsplashSBI Asha Scholarship
4,80,000applications processed across 3 cycles
- Context
- National scholarship verification and disbursement at scale.
- Constraint
- Volume with integrity: every false rejection is a student who doesn’t go to college.
- What changed
- Tiered verification with field checks triggered only by risk flags, and a distributed verification cadre.
Placeholder · UnsplashYouth Impact
78%twelve-month cohort retention, against a 60 to 70% norm
- Context
- A youth livelihoods program needing longitudinal tracking.
- Constraint
- Migrating cohorts: standard M&E loses 30 to 40% by month twelve, and not at random.
- What changed
- Mobilisers recruited from the community, contact built for migration, follow-ups tuned to the seasons.
Full case notes, including what didn’t work, are available on request. We’ll send the version with the failures in it.
Four kinds of partner, four different pressures.
Government
Scale and auditability. We work within your systems and build for handover to permanent staff.
Nonprofits
Execution that survives funder scrutiny, so your team stays on design and relationships.
CSR
Impact per rupee, instrumented from day one and reported whether or not it flatters.
Social entrepreneurs
A reference implementation you can point at before you raise.
1,200 people. 140 districts.
Field operations is a specific person walking a specific route on a specific morning. 74% of our field staff are hired from the districts they work in.
What procurement teams ask us.
Diagnostics are fixed-fee. Execution is priced per unit of field activity (per household, beneficiary or verification), so cost scales with delivery rather than headcount.
A diagnostic starts at ₹6 lakh. For execution we’re usually the wrong choice below 25 field staff or 3 districts, and we’ll say so.
You do, entirely. We keep no residual rights and delete our copies at handover unless you ask us to hold them.
Yes, often. We run collection and quality assurance; they run analysis and evaluation.
Your team runs it. We offer an optional quarterly audit and refresher, and stay reachable.
Yes, though India is where we are strongest. We have run programmes with partners in South Asia and East Africa, and the operating model travels: local hiring, a supervision cadence that works over distance, and systems that assume patchy connectivity. What we will not do is run a programme somewhere we cannot get a team onto the ground regularly.
Related insights & case studies.
Before you go to the field.
The operational decisions that decide whether a program works are made before the budget locks. A fifteen-minute call; if we’re not right for it, we’ll point you somewhere better.