Decoding Impact with Rathish Balakrishnan

The recent interim budget focused on how to enable women farmers, looking at how they can be raised up along with other smallholder farmers across India. Today, in certain key agricultural value chains like sugarcane, women make up 50% of the workforce. Yet their work is significantly undervalued as they face a 60% pay gap. This speaks to the deeper systemic challenges women in agriculture face, w...

Despite gains in its financial inclusion journey, access to financial services is limited to 86% of India's population. Access to credit specifically is a persistent challenge, reflected in the unmet credit need of Rs 25 lakh crores - aggravated by disaggregated data and tedious data sharing processes. Account aggregators are introducing open banking in India. They have the potential to revolu...

India is grappling with a severe mental health crisis, with over 197 million Indians diagnosed with mental disorders, exacerbated by a wide treatment gap. The good news is that there is growing recognition of the importance of mental health in the country. However, a thorough understanding of what it entails, what forms mental well-being takes, how it should be approached and conceptualised, is la...

In Part 2 of our discussion on Universal Health Coverage, host Rathish Balakrishnan and guest Dr Nachiket Mor dive into the need to define the right problems while taking a digital public goods approach to UHC, challenges with financing, and lessons from other countries. They also discuss how the private and public sectors can rethink existing approaches to healthcare delivery, and collaborate to...

Globally, universal health coverage (UHC) has been highlighted as an important goal, because of its close links to poverty reduction and potential to enhance the economic growth of countries. From public to private health care, across primary, secondary, and tertiary care, and whether we look at the challenges and opportunities for physicians or community health workers, the promise of UHC is head...

Technology has the potential to revolutionise Indian agriculture. There are innovations in seed and bioengineering platforms, use of robots and AI and blockchain that are enhancing efficiency and transparency in the sector. India's agritech industry comprises over 1300 companies and is projected to reach over ₹1 trillion by 2025. The recent 2023-24 budget allocated INR 450 crores to the Digita...

India is known for its large companies across manufacturing and technology, but what often goes unnoticed is that a large part of the employment in this country is actually driven by Micro Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs). MSMEs contribute to more than 30% of India's GDP, and 11 million of these are in fact very, very small. These comprise the segment of MSMEs known as nano entrepreneurs,...

Do we take the possibilities enabled by the unique identification system of Aadhar for granted in India today? Certain reports estimate that 850 million people around the world do not have an official ID, and that around 133 countries today do not have a digital payment system. Through India's digitisation revolution we have made leaps and bounds in how people can be uniquely identified for so...

Education is the Harry Potter of the social sector. Everybody loves it. Everybody puts money into it. Yet, why aren't we seeing sweeping outcomes? As per the Annual Status of Education Report or ASER 2022, in India the enrolment rate for primary schools stands at the highest it has ever been in Indian education history at 98.4%. However, only 42.8% of grade five students are able to read at gr...

Millets are often referred to as the crop of the future and India has been undergoing its own renaissance with this super food. Also, 2023 has been designated as the International Year of Millets by the UN, where India has been leading the discourse to develop the dialogue on millets globally. The magic of millets holds the promise of unlocking a model of production that is good for us, the farmer...

Digitalisation has already been a significant game changer for India's economy and society. Digital public infrastructure and digital public goods, or DPIs and DPGs,have emerged in the development ecosystem as a means to achieve population-scale social impact. We have already seen the potential of DPIs with the success of Aadhar and UPI, solving for identity and payment transfer problems. Whil...

The planet is on the verge of exceeding the 1.5 centigrade limit established by the 2015 Paris Agreement, placing the issue of climate change front and centre for all of us today. On the other side of this crises are vulnerable nations, who have fewer resource to fight climate change, and are facing the double jeopardy of climate justice. In our next episode of Decoding Impact we explored the topi...

India's G20 presidency is coming at a historic time. In the face of a mounting economic crisis, along with the demands placed by climate change, it is important for leading nations to pave a way for the world that is enduring and sustainable in the long term. 'Green growth' emerges as a critical priority, therefore, for the current G20 presidency. What is India's vision for green g...

In the last few years, digital health has emerged as a potential game changer for enabling accessible, affordable, and quality health care for all. The pandemic has only emphasised the role of digital health as a key enabler to achieve universal health coverage. In spite of the high potential of digital health, the urban-rural divide, the digital divide, the low economic social conditions and the...

With the government push towards an ‘Aatmanirbhar Bharat’, India has signalled that MSME will drive employment opportunities in the country. By 2025, MSMEs are anticipated to account for 50% of the national GDP and 60% of exports. Despite governments' best efforts, more than 90% of MSMEs remain micro-enterprises. Instead of growing from small to large firms, MSMEs are stuck in the missing middle s...

As supply chains across the globe expand and evolve, the effect their operations have on the 3P’s - People, Planet and Profits, becomes increasingly complex.  The effects on livelihoods are immense as more than 450 million people today are employed as a part of global supply chains, with a significant proportion of informal livelihoods depending on them. Supply chain operations result in over...

The skilling landscape in India continues to be plagued by issues such as supply and demand mismatch of skilled personnel, limited training facilities and a lack of effective credentialing systems.  The Digital Ecosystem for Skilling and Livelihood, or the DESH Stack e-portal has been launched with the aim to bring together stakeholders in one digital ecosystem, enabling easier discovery of o...

According to PLFS 2021, a staggering 80% of women attribute their absence from the labour force to being engaged in domestic duties, making the unpaid labour economy a central theme for the discourse on women's economic participation in India.   In this podcast episode, we try to understand the context of women and the unpaid labour economy in India, and why Indian women are less economically...

Women account for 48% of India's population however, with only 19% of them being a part of the labour force, our country suffers from an alarmingly low female participation rate in the workforce.   In this episode of Decoding Impact, we have Mitali Nikore as our guest speaker who is an economist, a gender policy specialist and the founder of the youth-led research group Nikore Associates. In...

Micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) are creating 11.1 crore jobs in India, second only to the agricultural sector. However, they are plagued by an acute shortage of, and access to formal credit. For this episode of Decoding Impact we will explore a potential solution for this in the form of technology, specifically the opportunities presented by the Open Credit Enablement Network, or OCEN....

Small and marginal farmers comprise 85% of all the farmers in India. They are plagued by issues such as lack of bargaining power, credit taxes, unavailability of farm inputs and access to various government and private sector-led farm interventions. Farmer Producer Organisations (FPO) have the potential to address these issues and make agriculture viable for Indian farmers. FPOs have been around f...

India is estimated to have 6.3 crore micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) that have the potential to flourish with innovative sales and marketing efforts, but are currently not part of the digital revolution. In this episode of Decoding Impact , we will explore an upcoming digital platform and protocol, the Open Network for Digital Commerce, or ONDC, and how it will enable access and supply...

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the distress, isolation, fear and anxiety that followed, mental health and well-being is a critical conversation that has arisen. India faces an acute mental health crisis. Mental morbidity affects over 1 in 7 Indians during their lifetime, at least one in five adults suffers from depression at some point in their life, and suicides are on the rise, wit...

Three billion people the world over are experiencing the phenomenon of 'hidden hunger'. In India, approximately 80% of the farmers are small-holder farmers. In today's episode of Decoding Impact , we discuss a solution that has the potential to transform both of these: biofortification.   The UN recently declared 2023 as the International Year of Millets, with the intent to build momentum for...