Towards reducing poverty in India

Poverty is an extremely significant issue for Indian society with some estimates suggesting that up to 75% of the Indian population may be poor and deprived of basic necessities to sustain a normally healthy life. Microfinance and social protection are considered as important micro-level strategies to reduce poverty but they suffer from significant service delivery constraints causing exclusion of a large majority of poor households from access to microfinance, and inclusion and exclusion errors and elite capture of social protection programmes. This work explores whether outreach of microfinance and impact of social protection may be enhanced if microfinance products are built on the provisions of social protection for the poor households, and services of microfinance and social protection are synergistically delivered leveraging on the strengths of each other. This work further looks into a possible institutional arrangement for such synergistic service delivery and analyses the feasibility of employing a State institution, India Post, for the purpose.