The latest iteration of India’s data protection legislation calls for a reminder of why the country needs a Personal Data Protection Bill and what would make it a good one.

Indian households and businesses hold their wealth primarily in physical assets like real estate, gold, and durables, while barely investing in any financial assets.

Protecting citizens’ privacy is a pre-eminent mandate of any data protection regime. The Digital Personal Data Protection Bill appears to have departed farther away from that mandate

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

There are several reasons for low take-up of life insurance policies in general and specifically low take-up of term life insurance. These factors range from supply side barriers such as misaligned incentive structures for agents selling life insurance policies, lack of availability and accessibility to a larger suite of life insurance products customized to the needs of low-income households to demand-side barriers such as household’s contextual factors that limit their awareness and priority for a life insurance product and their behavioural preferences pertaining to life insurance products.

Social Protection Open Digital Ecosystems (SP-ODEs) can provide beneficiaries, government and service providers a unified, digital platform to better access welfare schemes.

The social dimension of household finances is often missed by popular commentary on finance, which sees such decisions as being made by an individual for only themselves.

Colombia’s healthcare domain, like many other sectors in the country, was completely overhauled as part of the country’s sweeping reforms that followed the adoption of a new Constitution in 1991.

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.

Digital payments are currently being envisioned as a gateway to financial inclusion for the poor and marginalised in India. In this article, Indradeep Ghosh, Executive Director, Dvara Research, examines the rationale for such a vision. He argues that the penetration of digital payments remains low for the poor and marginalised, partly because of unfavourable economics and partly because digital payments interfaces are not well designed to suit this segment. If India can overcome these two hurdles, then digital payments can indeed become more common among the poor and marginalised, and thereby catalyse much wider and deeper financial inclusion in India than has hitherto been possible.