Leveraging Digital Public Infrastructure for building inclusive social protection systems
By Nikita Kwatra, Priya Vedavalli, Sharmadha Srinivasan & Vikram Sinha
April 29, 2024
Digital ID systems allow residents of a country to have verifiable, non-falsifiable proof of identity, creating a mechanism for establishing trust – a rare commodity in LMICs
At the New Delhi Leaders’ Summit Declaration in September 2023, the Government of India and fellow members of the G20 emphasised their commitment to accelerate the inclusive growth and social protection agenda, acknowledging the importance of promoting economic development that “leaves no one behind”.
Ensuring social protection for individuals is critical for promoting inclusive development by establishing a safety net for vulnerable populations. However, in India, many social protection schemes are designed for the past and do not consider new sources of risk and vulnerabilities stemming from climate change, urbanisation, and migration.
Climate change, the changing nature of work in digitised economies and socio-economic disparities will cause substantial economic and spatial dislocations in the medium-to-long term. As individuals and families frequently move across borders for employment and other opportunities, traditional social protection systems tied to specific geographic locations may fall short of providing adequate support.
Portable social protection systems are essential to address this challenge by ensuring the continuity of social security benefits for mobile populations. This report investigates the potential of harnessing digital public infrastructure (DPI) to optimise and make social protection systems more portable. This report lays out an actionable vision for an inclusive social protection system in India that delivers portable benefits to one of its most vulnerable populations, migrants.
The report contends that DPI’s “whole-of-government” approach not only helps unlock the benefits of portability but can also help address coordination issues that fragment social protection delivery, and improve backend integration to allow a single entry point to multiple schemes, thereby reducing transaction costs for individuals, and establish positive feedback loops by channelling accurate, up-to date data to inform the evolution of social protection programmes.
Read the full report here.
