A Tale of Trade-offs: The Anatomy of the Direct Benefit Transfers System

Business correspondent (BC) agents are crucial last-mile infrastructure that support India’s vision for efficient, population-scale delivery of financial and other government services using Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). These agents primarily facilitate cash deposits, cash withdrawals (together known as cash-in cash-out or CICO), and optionally facilitate access to insurance, savings products, and various welfare schemes for rural and low-income India.

In this blog, we propose a framework for evaluating agent success through a customer protection lens; this can potentially be deployed as a tool to determine agent success while also allowing stakeholders to identify context-specific levers to improve outcomes for the customer.

In this blog, we focus on the supply side of the equation, exploring the literature detailing the issues CICO agents face in offering uninterrupted CICO services. Agents who provide CICO services often encounter significant obstacles that hinder their capacity to assist customers effectively.

In this blog post, we collate evidence of the various reasons that prevent the BC network from offering access to reliable CICO services all over the country. We rely on a mix of evidence in the form of qualitative case studies, survey results, and secondary sources.

Any digital system built to deliver social protection to citizens must accentuate the benefits of digitisation for citizens while suppressing any harm to them.

The delivery infrastructure that supports social protection is in serious need of upheaval and is fraught with issues such as paucity of access points, operational issues causing transaction failure, and unethical activities like fraud.