Aarokya

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Are you ok?

That’s what “Aarokya” asks — it’s a name that phonetically echoes “Are you ok?”, rooted in the Sanskrit word for wholistic wellbeing. For India’s delivery riders, drivers, domestic workers, and construction workers, the answer has too often been: not really. Aarokya changes that. It’s a healthcare super-app that brings together a health savings account, affordable insurance, and on-demand doctor access — all in one place, built for people who’ve never had any of this before.

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Who Is Aarokya For?

India has over 200 million gig workers — delivery riders on Swiggy and Zomato, auto and cab drivers on Ola and Namma Yatri, domestic workers, construction laborers, and daily-wage earners across every city and town. These workers are:
  • Uninsured: Most have never bought health insurance. Premiums feel inaccessible, the paperwork is confusing, and no one explains what is actually covered.
  • Unbanked or under-banked: Many do not have savings set aside for a medical emergency. A hospitalization can wipe out months of earnings.
  • Without easy access to doctors: Taking time off for a clinic visit means lost income. Specialist consultations feel expensive and distant.
  • Digitally capable but underserved: These workers use smartphones every day for work — but fintech and health-tech apps are built for urban professionals, not for them.
Aarokya meets gig workers where they are: on their phone, in their language, with products priced for their income.

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The Problem We Solve

No safety net

A single hospitalization costs ₹30,000–₹1,50,000 on average. Without insurance or savings, gig workers borrow from money lenders at high interest rates, or simply delay care until it is too late.

Insurance is opaque

Buying insurance requires understanding plan types, exclusions, waiting periods, and claim processes. For a first-time buyer, this is a wall of jargon that keeps them uninsured.

Doctors feel inaccessible

A clinic visit costs time and money. Knowing what to tell a doctor — and getting the right specialist — is hard without any medical literacy. Symptoms get ignored until they become emergencies.

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How the Three Features Work Together

Savings, insurance, and consultations are not three separate products — they are one integrated safety net:
  1. Save regularly — small, frequent contributions into a ring-fenced health savings account
  2. Stay covered — preview the premium for a family and issue a Narayana Health policy in minutes
  3. Get care quickly — open a consultation against an eligible benefit and chat with a doctor without leaving home

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The “Are you ok?” Brand Story

The name Aarokya works on two levels. In Sanskrit, Ārogya (आरोग्य) means the state of being free from disease — wholistic physical and mental wellbeing. But phonetically, when spoken aloud, it echoes the simple question: “Are you ok?” That question is the product’s core philosophy. In the age of AI and automation, gig workers are becoming invisible to the systems that serve them. Aarokya is a counter-statement: in the age of AI, empathy will matter even more. Every product decision — the password-free login that does not burden workers with credentials, the in-app consultation that connects them to a real doctor, the savings account that accepts small contributions without minimum-balance requirements — is designed to say, implicitly: we see you, and we’re asking if you’re ok.

Health Savings

A ring-fenced savings account that can receive contributions from the worker, their employer, their platform, or a sponsor. Money flows only toward healthcare.

Insurance

Preview the exact premium for a worker’s family, preview the enrollment form, and issue a Narayana Health policy in minutes.

Consultations

Open a consultation against an eligible benefit and chat with a Narayana doctor — messages, attachments, and read receipts, all in-app.

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Get Started in 3 Steps

Aarokya is a partner-integrated API: a platform (a mobility, delivery, or employer app) integrates Aarokya on behalf of its workers. The partner authenticates the worker and exchanges their phone number for a scoped token.
1

Provision a platform credential

An Aarokya admin creates a platform for the partner and mints a credential via POST /platforms/{platform_id}/credentials, which returns a basic_token once. The partner exchanges that basic_token with Keycloak (client_credentials grant) for a platform service-account JWT. See the Platform module.
2

Issue a user token

The partner backend calls POST /auth/token as its service account, passing the worker’s phone number and an ID proof. Aarokya find-or-creates the user and returns a user_id and a JWT access_token.
3

Call user-scoped endpoints

Pass the returned access_token as a Bearer header on every user-scoped request. The path user_id must match the token’s user.
Testing locally: use http://localhost:8080 as the base URL. See the repository README for seeding a platform and credential in development.

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Explore

API Reference

Authentication, error codes, and the interactive Try It Out playground.

Module Guides

Deep dives into Auth, Platforms, Users, Accounts, Insurance Policies, Mandates, Consultations, and more.

System Architecture

How the mobile app, Rust backend, Juspay, and Narayana Health fit together.

Architecture Decisions

Why Rust, why Smithy, and how we designed the auth system.

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Common Questions

Aarokya does not own end-user authentication — that belongs to the partner app. The partner verifies the worker (typically a phone-based flow inside their own app), then exchanges the phone number for a scoped Aarokya token via POST /auth/token. This keeps Aarokya out of the credential-storage business entirely, and means workers never manage another password. The phone number acts as the identity anchor, which ties neatly into Aadhaar-based KYC when needed for insurance.
The health savings account is ring-fenced — money in it can only be used for healthcare expenses. This is intentional: it prevents health savings from being spent on other expenses, which is the most common reason medical emergency funds disappear. Balances and movements are tracked as a ledger, and the account operates under the RBI Prepaid Payment Instrument (PPI) framework.
In that case they can use their savings balance to pay for OPD, pharmacy, and other covered expenses at network hospitals. Aarokya encourages buying insurance, but the savings account is immediately useful even before a policy is purchased. The app also surfaces insurance options at the moment of care — “you’d be covered for this if you had Plan X.”
Narayana Health (NH) is one of India’s largest hospital networks, known for making cardiac surgery affordable. They provide: (a) insurance plans that workers can buy through Aarokya, (b) the conversation gateway that powers in-app doctor consultations, and (c) a network of hospitals where covered care is delivered.
Aarokya is a layered Rust backend whose API contracts are generated from Smithy models. The domains documented here — auth, platforms, users, dependants, accounts, MRNs, insurance policies, mandates and executions, orders, sponsors, the benefit catalogue, and consultations — each own their tables, business logic, and error types. See the Modules overview for the full map.
See the repository README for local setup. The backend requires PostgreSQL and a config file with the right secrets. Once running, the local base URL is http://localhost:8080.