Submission by Dvara Research to the Ministry of Finance as part of Pre-Budget Consultation with the honorable Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Jan 2nd 2025
The Government of India called for pre-budget consultations in early January 2025. Dvara Research was one of the invitees, and we are once again grateful to policy makers for reposing trust in our work. In the past as well, Dvara Research has been a partner and advisor of choice for key policy-making bodies in the country.
Know Your Kisan – A Peek into the Financial Lives of Indian Farmers through the NAFIS Survey 2021-22
In this blog, we will highlight some interesting facts about agricultural households from the survey through a set of questions that can help contextualise the financial lives of farmers and their families.
How rural households manage their financial lives- Insights from the NAFIS Report 2021-22
This blog presents key insights from the second round of the survey report, NAFIS 2021-22, and finds that the rural households’ investment portfolio continues to be dominated by physical assets, which is in contrast with the predominance of formal debt on the liabilities side of the household balance sheets.
How have household balance sheets changed post the pandemic? A descriptive analysis of household portfolios using CMIE’s Consumer Pyramid Household Survey Dataset
According to a report by Crif High Mark, microfinance loans overdue for up to 31-180 days increased from 2.1% in March 2024 to 2.7% in June 2024. While there could be several supply-side factors at play for the rise in defaults, in this blog we direct our attention to reviewing the household side of the story by assessing the changes in household balance sheets post the COVID-19 pandemic.
Could we be doing better with consent?
This blog presents a self-assessment checklist targeted at UI/UX designers and AA product managers, enabling them to surface gaps in the design of their consent artefacts especially in relation to the vulnerable customer.
Rethinking GRMs for UPI: Prototype Design
This is the second in a series of blogs which describe our efforts towards building an effective in-app GRM for India’s consumers
Field Notes: How constrained users engage with the GRMs of UPI Apps
This is the first in a series of blogs which describe our efforts towards building an effective in-app GRM for India’s UPI users
Our Response to RBI Draft Directions for Comments on Due Diligence of AEPS Touchpoint Operators
Our response covers two themes:
Leading from a customer protection perspective, our comments emphasise the need for the prospective SRO to have duties towards the customers, at par with responsibilities towards the regulator.
Assessing the Performance of PMJJBY and PMSBY: A Systems-Level Approach
The objective of this deck is to summarise learnings from fieldwork conducted in Rajasthan and Gujarat towards (i) building evidence on the customer protection issues in the sale and servicing of the two insurance schemes and (ii) bringing to the forefront the structural issues on the supply-side that are holding back Financial Service Providers (FSPs) from offering high-quality service in the context of these two schemes
Building an Effective UPI In-App GRM for India’s Consumers
In this study, we focus on whether consumers use the grievance mechanisms provided in UPI apps in smartphones, and whether those mechanisms make for an easily navigable grievance redress journey ending in satisfactory resolution.
