Decoding Impact with Rathish Balakrishnan

Get to know more about our latest guest featured on Decoding Impact, ⁠Neelkanth Mishra, through this revealing rapid fire!

The story of a digitised India being catalysed through Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is all around us through examples like UPI and Aadhaar, but they have an equally critical role to play in enabling the economic powerhouse that are MSMEs.

• Decoding Digital Public Goods & Digital Public Infrastructure with Dr. Pramod Varma

• Decoding India’s DPI Learnings for the Global South with Prof. S Rajagopalan

• Decoding Account Aggregators with Shalini Gupta

Get to know more about our latest guest featured on Decoding Impact, Ramraj Pai, through this revealing rapid fire!

At the core of enabling sustainable development it comes down to how it is funded that determines the success or failure of making true and lasting progress. Currently we face a significant challenge with achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, as there is a huge constraint in the lack of available funds to meet out the expense of realising these goals. So how can finance maximise impact?

Chapters:

00:00 - Precap

01:28 - Welcome

01:38 - Topic & Guest Intro

03:05 - Ramraj Pai's journey in blended finance

06:51 - Lessons from working in the impact ecosystem

12:25 - Blended Finance for dummies

18:48 - Understanding four essential truths of blended

finance

22:29 - The nuances of stakeholders in blended finance

31:14 - Summarising insights around blended finance and considering the larger framework

36:12 - Categories for blended finance application

39:41 - The role of blended finance to scale innovation

42:20 - What is limiting the supply and demand of blended finance?

47:03 - The mindset shift needed for development financing to be catalytic & innovative

50:44 - Where can funders begin their blended finance journey and how can the government enable them?

55:44 - Summarising insights on how to enable the ecosystem and infrastructure for blended finance

59:04 - Regulatory challenges

01:04:36 - Blended finance and the four stages of the innovation life cycle

01:06:54 - Summary of key insights and enabling domestic philanthropy and the Social Stock Exchange

01:12:56 - Summary and thanks

Get to know more about our latest guest featured on Decoding Impact, Mr. Kaushal Jaiswal, through this revealing rapid fire!

A part of solving India’s water crisis lies on its farms. From soil, to grain, cultivation, to harvesting, none knows the agrarian land in India and its potential more than our farmers. By empowering farmers with technology that will help them with greater yield, while enabling water conservation for the nation, the agriculture sector in India could be transformed.

The solution? Micro-irrigation. How has irrigation and the water problem evolved together in India? What is the promise of micro-irrigation? What are the barriers preventing this solution from scaling? Join Rathish Balakrishnan in the latest episode of Decoding Impact in discussion with Kaushal Jaiswal, MD at Rivulis Irrigation, for this practical discussion on micro-irrigation, the potential of India’s farmers, and a way forward to conserve water in India.

• Worsening Water Stress in Agriculture: Is There a Glimmer of Hope?

Time Stamps & Chapters:

00:00 - Precap
01:35 - Welcome
01:55 - Topic intro
03:02 - Guest intro
07:08 - How has discussing irrigation and the water problem evolved in India
10:00 - Micro-irrigation as a practice in the North vs. the South of India
13:01 - The invisible cost of water in agriculture
14:45 - Understanding the value of drip irrigation
19:44 - Are benefits of micro-irrigation visible to the farmer?
23:08 - Why is the adoption of micro-irrigation so low in India today?
30:59 - The role of AI in democratising micro-irrgation systems and set-up.
33:07 - The maintenance of micro-irrigation systems
35:27 - The solution to scaling micro-irrigation
38:53 - Reducing the friction for financing & the role of subsidies
41:58 - Scaling micro-irrigation for 1 million farmers
43:18 - The most investable solutions to scale micro-irrigation in agriculture
45:09 - Crops to prioritise for micro-irrigation
48:22 - Regions to prioritise for micro-irrigation
49:19 - The market for micro-irrigation in East India
52:23 - Financing micro-irrigation through climate financing
56:05 - Summary and Thanks
58:57 - Outro

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, with their role and contributions being largely obscured.

Produced by: Pickle Jar Media

Time Stamps & Chapters:

Account aggregators are introducing open banking in India. They have the potential to revolutionise the credit market, empowering millions of customers to access and share their financial data across institutions in a secure and efficient manner.
To talk more about account aggregators and how these can enable financial digital inclusion, we have with us Shalini Gupta, the Head of Strategy at Sahamati. Sahamati is a member-driven industry alliance formed to facilitate adoption of the account aggregator ecosystem in India.

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00:48 - Introduction to the topic and guest

02:32 - What is an Account Aggregator?

06:40 - What financial information is viable and who will use it?

10:21 - Personal Finance Management (PFM) Use Cases

13:14 - How big is the AA system today?

15:37 - A User's Journey in the AA Framework

18:17 - Common AA Apps

18:59 - Value in Data Sharing

24:53 - Resolving Conflicts of Purpose between Financial Entities

28:40 - A New Approach to Gauging Financial Health

34:36 - What is Sahamati's Role?

37:59 - How can Account Aggregators Unlock Value?

50:30 - The Interplay of OCEN and AA

55:57 - PFM for Women

59:11 - Account Aggregators for the Government

1:03:01 - What needs to fall in place?

1:08:02 - Employing Imagination to Utilise AA

1:13:54 - The Role of Philanthropic Capital

1:19:02 - Summary and outro

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 lacking.

Mental well-being is intertwined with economic, cultural, social and other factors at various stages of an individual’s life. Effective interventions, therefore, should be contextualised to these aspects. How can public policy, market solutions and community solutions be designed with these in mind?

Joining us on World Mental Health Day to share her reflections on making mental health a key part of India’s development agenda, is Dr Pratima Murthy. Dr. Murthy is the Director of NIMHANS, where she has been pivotal in initiating Tele Manas, and establishing the state-of-the-art Centre for Addiction. She has also worked with the National Human Rights Commission to improve care for persons with mental illness.

For more, follow Sattva Knowledge Institute on our ⁠Website⁠, LinkedIn⁠, ⁠Instagram⁠, and ⁠Twitter⁠.

Host: Rathish Balakrishnan | ⁠Linkedin | Twitter

Guest: Dr. Pratima Murthy | Linkedin

Producer: Meenakshi Iyer

Audio Engineer & Editor: Abhilash Raikar

Designer: Usha Sondhi Kundu

Content Sections:

02:14 Why is mental well-being critical?

04:17 Recognising interconnections

08:10 Vocabulary and mental models

12:22 Context-specific intervention design

15:38 Designing population-scale interventions

23:11 Perinatal well-being

26:06 Mental health in schools

36:01 Mental health in workplaces

39:42 Prisons as a crucial locus

44:55 Mental health for the elderly

47:54 Improving access to care

51:41 Designing mental well-being models

58:22 Recommendations for philanthropy

1:02:15 Summary and Outro

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 implement an efficient working model for UHC in India.

Dr. Nachiket Mor is trained as an economist. His current work is principally focused on the design of national and regional health systems. He is a Visiting Scientist at The Banyan Academy of Leadership in Mental Health and a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy at IIIT Bangalore. He is also a Commissioner on the Lancet Commission on Reimagining India's Health System.

Listen to Part 1 here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5rsqLW3phlu3XLRgX1kteg

For more, follow Sattva Knowledge Institute on our ⁠Website⁠, ⁠LinkedIn, ⁠Instagram⁠, and ⁠Twitter⁠.
Host: Rathish Balakrishnan | ⁠Linkedin | Twitter

Content Sections
0:00 - Decoding Impact Introduction
0:48 - Introduction to topic and guest
02:13 - Accelerating UHC with Digital Public Goods
07:02 - Articulation of DPGS
16:04 -Promises of Healthcare
19:23 - Financing in UHC
23:21 - Incentives for public health
26:35 - Managed Care
29:56 - Making Strategic Purchases effective
34:30 - District as a unit
35:37 - Private Sector Participation Models
44:23 - White spaces
47:40 - Imagining a Working Model in Health
52:06 - Summary and Outro