Eligo is an independent civic information platform. We are not affiliated with the Government of India or any state government.

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RESEARCH PROTOCOL

Data Verification Standards & QA Gate Protocols

Eligo operates under strict, non-negotiable data sourcing standards. Every eligibility rule, deadline, and monetary benefit must trace directly to official government documentation.

1. Authoritative Source Hierarchy

When conflicting information exists between portals or press releases, researchers and automated parsers must strictly adhere to the following tier hierarchy:

T1

Tier 1: Authoritative Law & Official Gazettes

The Gazette of India, State Government Gazettes, Acts of Parliament, and State Legislative notifications. This is the ultimate statutory authority for benefit quotas and criteria.

T2

Tier 2: Primary Scheme Portals (.gov.in / .nic.in)

Official portals dedicated to the scheme (e.g. pmkisan.gov.in, scholarships.gov.in). Operational guidelines hosted here govern day-to-day citizen applications.

T3

Tier 3: Nodal Portals & Central Ministry Sites

National discovery portals such as myscheme.gov.in, india.gov.in, and direct Central Ministry homepages (e.g. agricoop.nic.in).

T4

Tier 4: Press Information Bureau (PIB) Releases

Official press releases from pib.gov.in. PIB notifications reflect formal Union Cabinet approvals and budget decisions, superseding outdated portal copy.

Strictly Prohibited Sources: Private commercial blogs, educational coaching websites, unverified news aggregation channels, social media claims, and AI-inferred guesswork. Any record relying on secondary sources is immediately rejected.

2. 180-Day Re-verification SLA & Automated Audits

Government programs evolve rapidly across fiscal cycles. To prevent dead links and stale criteria:

  • Daily Cron Execution: An automated Cloudflare Cron Worker runs daily at midnight UTC (0 0 * * *).
  • Staleness Detection: Any active scheme with a last_verified_date older than 180 days is automatically queued for human re-verification in the review_queue.
  • Deadline Approaching Alerts: Schemes with application windows closing within 30 days are flagged to alert visitors and researchers.
  • Read/Write Isolation: The automated auditor cannot mutate scheme criteria; only human researchers can verify gazettes and publish updates with an accompanying change log.

3. Pre-Publish Automated QA Gate

Before any scheme is made active in Eligo, it must pass 5 programmatic gates:

Gate 1: Domain VerificationOfficial source must resolve to a valid .gov.in, .nic.in, or state government portal.
Gate 2: Active URL HealthOfficial apply URL must return HTTP 200 or 301/302 during pre-flight checks.
Gate 3: Freshness Windowlast_verified_date must be less than 180 days old at time of publication.
Gate 4: Mandatory CriteriaName, benefits schedule, application process, and eligibility matrix must be complete.

4. Human Spot-Check Protocol

To maintain 100% data integrity as we scale to thousands of welfare programs:

  • 100% Audit of First 50 Schemes: The first 50 schemes added to Eligo undergo exhaustive line-by-line verification against primary source documents.
  • 5% Sampling (1 in 20): All ongoing batch additions undergo random 1-in-20 human spot audits.
  • Zero-Tolerance Batch Rejection: If any spot-checked scheme contains a factual error (hallucinated income limit or incorrect benefit amount), the entire batch is halted and re-audited.