Art Appraisal Blog

This note describes how the Indian state of Bihar addressed the policy challenges to implement a cash transfer program for migrants and the lessons it holds for India and globally.

The financial impact of COVID-19 has been hitting the poor. Governments are adjusting cash transfer programs and utilizing national payment systems to mitigate these negative impacts. This blog reviews responses from Latin America, Asia and Sub Saharan Africa where governments with limited resources are coming up with innovative solutions to the crisis.

Around the world, cash transfer programs are being implemented by governments in response to COVID-19. Pakistan introduced the Ehsaas Emergency Cash Program, which requires mobile phones and national IDs to register. Using data from the 2018 Financial Inclusion Insights survey, we estimate large gender gaps in mobile phone ownership and national ID possession, leaving women are at risk of being disproportionately excluded from the program. To address this, the government should ensure women are more purposefully targeted, perhaps by reserving more slots for women or prioritizing women's registrations.

Advances in payment infrastructure are enabling governments to channel payments through multiple providers, giving people greater choice over how to receive payments. This is an important shift with implications for financial services providers, recipients of government payments and financial inclusion.

This event will highlight the opportunities and challenges of using COVID-19 financial transfers to individuals and MSMEs to build better digital payments infrastructure

NITI Aayog and MSC will host a webinar on 5th June, 2020 at 7 p.m. IST/1:30 p.m. GMT to explore the lessons from India’s experience with digital G2P payments, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic response.

In the first blog from our new series on lessons from India for the world, we will look at the basic components of the digitized G2P ecosystem that enabled India to support beneficiaries even when the whole country was under lockdown. We will follow this with detailed modules on each component.

As part of its program to facilitate exposure visits to India for governments across the globe, MSC has documented India's journey towards financial inclusion and digital governance.

As part of its program to facilitate exposure visits to India for governments across the globe, MSC has documented India's journey towards financial inclusion and digital governance. The first four modules of this series were Aadhaar, PMJDY, Digital Governance, and PFMS. The fifth and last module is Agent Networks.

As part of its program to facilitate exposure visits to India for governments across the globe, MSC has documented India's journey towards financial inclusion and digital governance. The first three modules of this series were Aadhaar, PMJDY, and Digital Governance. The fourth module of this series is on Public Financial Management System (PFMS).