The Social Protection Initiative at Dvara Research is a policy initiative that aims to conduct research that will inform the design and implementation of a universal social security system. We believe a universal social security system is one that protects households and individuals against the vulnerabilities faced across the life cycle. At the same time, it is important to keep in mind India’s unique demographic and economic realities. These vulnerabilities are the outcomes of complex interactions of being exposed to a threat, of a threat materializing, and of lacking the defences or resources to deal with a threat.
Research Associate
Research Associate
Senior Research Associate
Senior Research Associate
The study is authored by Aarushi Gupta, senior research associate at Dvara Research. Bindu Ananth, co-founder and chair of Dvara Trust. Bindu Ananth and Hasna Ashraf are fellow, Lancet Citizen’s Commission on Reimagining India’s Health Systems.
In this series's of blog posts, we will provide challenges and gaps in the BoCW Act implementation and highlight the viewpoints of multiple stakeholders in the BoCW Act registration and service delivery.
In this post, we set out our vision for what social protection in India should aim to do, and then pose some questions on how we might achieve this.
Health systems are extremely complex, with multiple interacting components which can lead to varied outcomes depending on the context in which they are placed. Building a systematic understanding is then essential for designing health systems and reforming existing ones.
In this paper, we propose an analytical framework that provides an overview of the various actors and processes involved in financing, purchasing, provision and provider payments.
In India, nearly 65% of the healthcare spending is out of pocket by individuals. The remaining 35% is highly fragmented and comes from a number of central and state government funds, and insurance companies. The unprecedented healthcare crisis caused by the pandemic has brought a number of concerns about the effectiveness and sustainability of the healthcare system to the forefront.
The social protection landscape in India is transforming at rapid speed owing to the digitization of the various systems that are involved in the process flow of social protection delivery.
Blog post series: This series of posts will attempt to do two things – first, to examine the definitional boundaries of social protection and where they relate to other financial services for low-income households, and second, to use this to arrive at a working definition of social protection for policymakers and research organisations such as Dvara Research. As a first step, we break down a few questions in this first post.
In this piece, we revisit Enthoven’s principles and propose a broader definition of the concept of managed competition in order that it may encompass other countries’ experiences that do not conform to a strict application of Enthoven’s concept.
Based on a study of the theoretical and empirical literature, we conclude with a set of hypotheses that looks at how demand for health insurance can be fostered by targeting both the components of demand (intention and action), through well-designed awareness measures and nudges to overcome the various behavioural biases involved.
In all our research efforts, we strive to maintain an independent voice that speaks for the low-income household and household enterprises. Our ability to perform this function is significantly enhanced by our commitment to disseminate as a pure public good, all the intellectual capital that we create.
