Aishwarya Narayan

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 interim report, we document our observations about the user interface of In-App GRMs in UPI applications (UPI Apps). Our observations are based on our review of the customer redress journey on these GRMs – mainly in terms of the GRM’s accessibility and usability – from the lens of a low-income, digital immigrant customer.

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.

Technological advancement is enabling governments to break away from this fragmented model and adopt an approach that allows individual departments to share infrastructural capacities. In policy parlance, this new approach is referred to as an ‘ecosystem-based’ delivery model, wherein several government departments are integrated at the back end, operate on the same platform, with their workflows interoperable with each other.

'JAM' trinity facilitates direct benefit transfers of welfare subsidies into bank accounts of poor, but teething issues have kept the programme from realising its true potential.

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.

More than half the payment failures may be due to incorrect Aadhaar details, or bank accounts that are wrongly flagged as inactive

Our recently concluded State of Exclusion study finds that payment failures during the back-end processing of a Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) payment are a significant concern. In this blog piece, we highlight the broad takeaways to help the reader better understand the landscape of payment failures.We also set out some broad recommendations to be taken into consideration by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to improve the chances of a successful DBT payment.

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.

CoWIN has been developed as a digital platform to support Covid-19 vaccination efforts in India. While most are familiar with the interface for citizens to book vaccination slots, CoWIN also supports multiple other functions.