Why customer protection is central to financial inclusion
India needs a robust and comprehensive financial customer protection regime, which it currently lacks. Imagine the following scenario. Raja and Rani are a low-income householder couple with two children in elementary school. They also take care of Raja’s ailing mother. The household’s monthly income is ₹20,000.
Insuring Low-Income Households- Why disclosure matters
In this deck, we discuss some factors influencing life insurance take-up, the problem with endowment life insurance for the low-income segment, and how better disclosures could be the first step in helping households choose the right insurance product for them.
The financial lives of platform workers: A diaries study in Bengaluru, India
The study explores the financial lives of platform workers and finding answers to the following questions: do platform workers face volatility in their income and expenses, and how much do their earnings and expenditures vary on a day-to-day basis; how long do they work to earn as much as they would like to; whether and where they save and borrow; what strategies do they adopt to manage their money to meet their day-to-day expenses, raise lump-sums, deal with and recover from shocks; what social protection benefits do they have access to; what their financial goals are; and what barriers exist, if at all, in their pursuit of those goals.
How banking infrastructure impacts citizens’ withdrawal of social protection benefits
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.
What should social protection do?
In this post, we set out our vision for what social protection in India should aim to do, and then pose some questions on how we might achieve this.
What is Social Protection?
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.
CORE Net Member Showcase: Conversations with Social Protection Initiative, Dvara Research
In this set of videos, we discuss our work pertaining to exclusion and the delivery of social protection entitlements
Digitisation and Privatisation in Social Protection Systems: International Trends
This blog post deconstructs three crucial examples of states seeking to implement digital welfare systems and contracting out design and implementation to private entities
Building SOPs for Grievance Redressal to Reduce Exclusions in Access to Social Protection Schemes for Poor and Vulnerable Populations
Dvara Research, in collaboration with Gram Vaani, University of Montreal, and Tika Vaani has been selected for the Azim Premji University COVID-19 Research Funding Programme 2020
Proceedings of Roundtable on Social Security for Self-Employed Workers in the Informal Sector
The Social Protection Initiative organised a closed-door virtual roundtable discussion on social security for self-employed workers
