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
Senior Research Associate
This paper provides a conceptual framework for citizen- centricity, breaking it down into system- level design features. It provides case studies of three SP- DPIs in the Indian context, and surfaces crucial learnings about their design.
This paper argues that institutional stability and change in social protection policy in India are best explained through the explanatory power of ideas and the interactive processes of discourse. However, traditional institutionalist theories, whether rational choice, sociological, or historical, tend to underplay the role of ideas and discourse as drivers of institutional stability and change.
Managed competition is a theoretical concept for designing and regulating health insurance systems. Such systems can secure consumers' interests by managing diverging incentives, instituting uniform regulations, equipping consumers to make informed choices, and creating a competitive environment tailored to rewarding those organisations that improve services to consumers.
Financing of health systems is an enduring concern world wide. Yazbeck and colleagues in their paper make an important point that when there is a choice between financing in which contributions from citizens take place in the form of generalised taxes versus those in which they are in the form of insurance premiums, the overwhelming evidence suggests that tax-based financing is unambiguously superior even in low- and middle-income countries. Despite the strength of their case against contributory insurance, we suggest that the path forward may be more complex than they envisage for a number of reasons.
The promise of SP-ODEs is compelling but it is worth reiterating that deploying them would not automatically translate into better welfare delivery.
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.
We argue that cooperative healthcare can be a viable pathway towards UHC in India only when characterised by some form of managed care structure that is designed to deliver the dual objective of healthcare access and financial risk protection.
'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.
Any digital system built to deliver social protection to citizens must accentuate the benefits of digitisation for citizens while suppressing any harm to them.
Social Protection Open Digital Ecosystems (SP-ODEs) can provide beneficiaries, government and service providers a unified, digital platform to better access welfare schemes.
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.
