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.

In recent months, there have been several reports on platform workers demanding greater worker rights in India.

In this blog post, we present our comments to the Report of the Working Group on Digital Lending including Lending through Online Platforms and Mobile Apps, November 2021 (the Report) in response to the call for comments from all stakeholders by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

Gold dominates household portfolios in India. This has been labelled as irrational behaviour by financially illiterate households. In this paper, we show that household preference towards gold is not irrational in the context of the Indian financial and macroeconomic environment which includes high inflation, financial repression, and capital controls.

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.

Identifying the Market Failure and Mis-identifying the Intervention The discussion paper highlights a ‘market failure’ in the debt market for MSMEs wherein incumbent banks are unwilling to lend to MSMEs, who are otherwise creditworthy, due to lack of documentation and thereby leading to suboptimal outcomes for both banks and MSMEs[3]. Adding to these frictions is […]

In our response, we question the assumptions put forth by the discussion paper for the creation of DBs and the concomitant licensing and regulatory regime.

Complex financial instruments and products can help consumers to meet their precise financial needs even if they are opaque in their design details due to the underlying mathematical principles. Regulators need to understand that restricting complexity in design is not in the best interests of the consumer.

In this post, we Introduce the Dvara-Haqdarshak Study on Exclusion in Government to Person Payments.

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.