National : Primus Partners – India’s leading consultancy – launched its latest thought leadership report, ‘Families at the centrepiece of Viksit Bharat, outlining the need for Governments of today to curate a family-based repository of citizens for enhancing their welfare delivery landscape.  The report also provides recommendations on the dos and don’ts to formulate such a repository within a State.

With Haryana and Karnataka already showcasing various practical use cases for transforming welfare delivery and significantly reducing leakages and application processing time by implementing a family based repository, many other States including Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar and Tamil Nadu have also seen the merit in this concept and are in varied stages of implementation of a family ID repository within their respective States.

Some key highlights of the report:

  • In the year 2023-24, the Central Government allocated close to ₹13.7 lakh crores for welfare and subsidy schemes with individual States also running separate schemes for their respective citizens.
  • Family-based parameters provide a more accurate, fair, and practical measure of the economic and social needs of a citizen. The concept has already been successfully implemented in countries like Brazil and has also been adopted by States like Haryana & Karnataka, wherein it has proven to be a huge success.
  • Considering the vast demographic divide in a country like ours, governments should refrain from formulating a definition of a family for such an initiative. Rather, guidelines for considering a member as a part of the family based on key features of a family, such as kinship, economic dependence, colocation, etc., must be considered.

The report provides the following recommendations based on the learnings gathered from the implementation of family-based systems across the country:

  • Central Government may publish generic guidelines about the characteristics that can be used by the States to define parameters for a family in their States.
  • With the advent of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, a consent management framework would need to be formulated to garner, store & maintain citizen consent for processing of their respective data.
  • It is recommended that such consent should be specific in nature, which allows only the required information regarding a citizen to be shared with the scheme delivery systems. This shall require States to undertake a comprehensive exercise to map the eligibility criteria of all schemes/services of the State, with the citizen parameters being captured in such an initiative.
  • It is recommended that the “Family-based repository for social protection and welfare delivery” should be included as a subject in the Concurrent List in the Seventh Schedule of the Indian Constitution to enable States to formulate and maintain such a repository at the State level for determining eligibility and enabling ease of application for welfare delivery systems in the State.

Further, such complex initiatives shall involve the use of technologies such as AI & NLP, which require complex hardware, leading to a higher total cost of ownership for States.Hence, it is recommended that the Central Government consider setting up a common data factory for the storage & processing of all such family-based initiatives of the States. This should not only help reduce the risk of data leakages and the total cost of ownership of the States, but should also help the Central government to use data generated by such systems in an anonymized manner for effective planning of welfare and benefits delivered to citizens across the country. 

Sameer Jain, Managing Director and Board Member at Primus Partners, said, “A Family ID is a forward-looking concept that can redefine how welfare is delivered by aligning support with the real needs of families. It enables the government to design more targeted, equitable, and efficient interventions, helping build a stronger, more inclusive society as we work towards the vision of Viksit Bharat.”

As India moves towards creating a more mature and technology-based welfare delivery system, the focus shall shift from individual targeting to family-based targeting, since it shall help to make welfare delivery more responsive, transparent, and equitable, eventually aiding governments to achieve saturation of schemes.