Decoding Impact with Rathish Balakrishnan

The Indian energy sector is at a critical juncture. Electricity consumption, a key indicator of economic growth, has grown significantly over the past 50-60 years, and India is primed to leapfrog into a sustainably powered future.

This transition calls for a robust policy foundation, technological advancements in demand-supply and storage mechanisms, and a keen study of economic incentives for users of green energy. In this episode of Decoding Impact, Rathish Balakrishnan is in conversation with scientist Dr. Nikit Abhyankar to unpack the unique opportunity India has, to transition to renewable energy, with economic viability and technological feasibility at the centre.

Through this conversation, you will learn about:

• The interplay between energy consumption and economic growth;

• The potential for the energy sector to leapfrog mirroring India's telecom boom;

• The policy environment, key shifts necessary in demand management, and

• The role of digital public infrastructure (DPI) in facilitating efficient energy transactions.

Tune into this latest episode of Decoding Impact today!

Dr Nikit Abhyankar is a Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a Senior Scientist at the Center for Environmental Public Policy of the University of California, Berkeley. Dr Abhyankar has conducted extensive research and policy analysis on a range of key energy issues such as renewable energy, energy efficiency, electric vehicles, and energy access in the United States and key emerging economies such as India, China, Indonesia, and Vietnam. He regularly advises governments, regulators, and utilities in multiple countries on designing clean energy policies and programs.

With the recent Union Budget announcement allocating ₹1.48 lakh crore to education, employment, and skilling, one question we continue to grapple with in the impact ecosystem, but in Education especially, is whether money is enough to really achieve the outcomes needed?

Since Independence, Education has been the cornerstone of growth, development, and perhaps most importantly, hope for the nation. Yet, after so many decades of interventions, well-intentioned individual efforts, and the collective intent across philanthropy, the corporate sector, and government, why is Education in India still falling short of excellence?

In this episode of Decoding Impact, through a rich and powerful discussion with expert guests from Avanti Fellows, Akshay Saxena, Co-founder & co-CEO, & Vandana Goyal, Managing Trustee & co-CEO, host Rathish Balakrishnan delves into challenges across scale, systems, and gender in Education today to understand what it will take to truly scale excellence in India's education system.

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India is the third largest innovation ecosystem in the world. From India's transformational growth in the IT sector to her rapid digitisation, innovation is truly having its moment in India today. However, despite this promising outlook, social innovation continues to face challenges to scale.

Faced by the perennial challenge that the problems for people and planet are running faster than the solutions being created to solve them, social innovation has a critical and lasting role to play in ensuring we break the cycle of creating poor solutions for the poor. In this episode of Decoding Impact, Rathish Balakrishnan and expert guest Manoj Kumar engage in a dialogue on social innovation that is not only helpful to understand the innovation landscape in India today, but to also numerous ideas and examples of what social innovation looks like.

Through this discussion you will get insight into:

• India's innovation landscape

• The mental models for entrepreneurs to succeed

• The architecture needed for social innovation to scale

• How we need to look at unlocking diverse forms of capital from across CSR and Philanthropy

Tune into this latest episode of Decoding Impact today!

Manoj Kumar is the founder of Social Alpha, a multistage innovation curation and venture development platform that has supported over 300 startups under his leadership. Manoj is one of the pioneering forces in India's social innovation landscape, with a wealth of expertise and hands-on experience founding startups.

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Worldwide, roads are increasingly seeing the presence of electric vehicles (EV) and India is expected to take 30% of the EV market worldwide. However, these tailwinds are attracting many players to the EV ecosystem, from suppliers to customers, to make EVs a reality on the road.

In order to ease the challenges that these stakeholders could face in coming together, Digitial Public Infrastructure could have a key role to play and could help:

• Reduce frictions

• Enable greater customer experience

• Drive better adoption for electrical vehicles in India, especially when it comes to the charging experience

To learn more about India's burgeoning EV market and understand whether the promise of DPI can enable the EV market to solve some of its current challenges, in this episode of Decoding Impact Rathish Balakrishnan is joined by Akhil Jayaprakash, co-founder at Pulse Energy, and Arun Vinayak, co-founder at Exponent Energy. Through this discussion Akhil and Arun share their expertise to help us understand who the key stakeholders are in the EV market, what is the user experience when it comes to EV today in India, and what unification using DPI could look like in the EV market.

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Philanthropy plays a vital role in the development sector naturally, however, in India today philanthropy capital accounts for only 5% of the total funding, with 95% coming from the governments.

Is there a way we can reimagine the development sector, as a market place, that can manage risk in the hope of certain returns and rewards? With blended finance there is an opportunity to change how capital fuels and enables scale of impact. Within the promise of blended finance, philanthropy could play a significant, catalytic role, and in this episode of Decoding Impact host Rathish Balakrishnan is joined by Prachi Windlass, a Senior Director and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, India, to discuss:

• What does blended finance look like in India today?

• How does philanthropic capital and other sources of capital come together to create a blended finance model?

• The maturity curve for blended finance to come in

• Tangible examples of how blended finance can enable impact

With the challenge of a capital shortfall to meet the total annual funding required for India to achieve the promise of the Sustainable Developement Goals by 2030, Prachi lends her experience and expertise to illustrate the true value philanthropy can unlock to enable a sustainable transformation in India's impact ecosystem. Listen to the latest episode of Decoding Impact today on Youtube!

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"There are three types of people who work in education today: those who know the reality of a classroom, there are those who know the reality of grassroots, but there are very few who know the reality of how government looks at education."

In this very special episode of Decoding Impact, host Rathish Balakrishnan is joined by Anil Swarup, Founder Chairman, Nexus of Good; Former Secretary, School Education (2016-18) & Coal (2014-16), and Author. Mr. Swarup joins us to help us decode the complex Education sector in India today and understand more about:

• The visible and invisible challenges in Education

• The role of the government between Delhi and the hinterlands

• How to enable young adults thrive in the Indian Education system

• Defining roles for different stakeholders in the Education sector

Tune in to the latest episode of Decoding Impact today to understand more about the government's role in Education as well as some unique stories from Mr. Swarup's incredible Bhārat Yātra across the nation!

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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.

MSMEs are a popular topic, and one we have discussed a few times on Decoding Impact itself, but in this episode of we are trying to understand the role DPIs can play in enabling greater and more effective access to capital for MSMEs. To share his expert inputs on the podcast, host Rathish Balakrishnan speaks to Mr. Neelkanth Mishra, Chief Economist, Axis Bank and Head of Global Research, Axis Capital. Mr. Mishra helps us understand: • The context of MSMEs in India today • The existing capital access and supporting infrastructure, including global examples • The key tailwinds that can enable MSMEs to grow, like DPI

Through out Mr. Mishra shares tangible examples for how MSMEs operate, can scale, and their challenges. Tune in to the latest episode of Decoding Impact today!

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.

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Despite gains in its financial inclusion journey, access to financial services is limited to 86% of India's population. Access to credit specifically is a persistent challenge, reflected in the unmet credit need of Rs 25 lakh crores - aggravated by disaggregated data and tedious data sharing processes.

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.

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

Globally, universal health coverage (UHC) has been highlighted as an important goal, because of its close links to poverty reduction and potential to enhance the economic growth of countries.

From public to private health care, across primary, secondary, and tertiary care, and whether we look at the challenges and opportunities for physicians or community health workers, the promise of UHC is heady and exciting. Through this two-part discussion with Dr. Nachiket Mor, not only an expert in health, but someone who is deeply passionate about health and health systems, host Rathish Balakrishnan explores the plethora of trade-offs and barriers to realising UHC in India.

In part one of this discussion Dr. Mor helps us understand what universal health coverage is, highlights existing bright spots, looks at the role of primary care, and discusses how we can talilor an approach to UHC that leverages India’s strengths.

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.

Technology has the potential to revolutionise Indian agriculture. There are innovations in seed and bioengineering platforms, use of robots and AI and blockchain that are enhancing efficiency and transparency in the sector. India's agritech industry comprises over 1300 companies and is projected to reach over ₹1 trillion by 2025. The recent 2023-24 budget allocated INR 450 crores to the Digital Agriculture Mission and INR 600 crores for technology driven agriculture promotion.

However, despite these promising tailwinds, the low adoption of technology by farmers remains a major challenge, and agritech penetration in India remains abysmally low at around 1%. In today's episode of Decoding Impact, we try to understand the potential of a platform-based approach for agritech, the importance of directing the right capital to address the right issues, and how we can take a systems approach to identify key enablers for the successful scale up of agritech.

Our guest for this episode is Mr. Parmesh Shah, the Global Lead for Data, Digital Agriculture and Innovation at the Agriculture and Food Global Practice of the World Bank. Mr. Shah is currently managing a global programme on scaling up data-driven digital agriculture, involving data platforms and establishing ecosystems for innovation, entrepreneurship and incubation across 38 countries.

India is known for its large companies across manufacturing and technology, but what often goes unnoticed is that a large part of the employment in this country is actually driven by Micro Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs).

MSMEs contribute to more than 30% of India's GDP, and 11 million of these are in fact very, very small. These comprise the segment of MSMEs known as nano entrepreneurs, with an annual turnover between ten lakhs and one crore.

On this episode of Decoding Impact, host Rathish Balakrishnan speaks with Priya Naik, Founder and CEO at Samhita Social Ventures, to discuss who are these nano entrepreneurs, what are their challenges, and how can the ecosystem catalyse their potential to become growth engines for the Indian economy.

Priya has two decades of experience in impact and entrepreneurship and has worked with International Finance Corporation, the Poverty Action Lab at MIT, and Arthur Andersen.

Do we take the possibilities enabled by the unique identification system of Aadhar for granted in India today?

Certain reports estimate that 850 million people around the world do not have an official ID, and that around 133 countries today do not have a digital payment system. Through India's digitisation revolution we have made leaps and bounds in how people can be uniquely identified for social welfare needs and how they can use that identity to manage basic civic rights like accessing financial services, government support, and even applying for a job.

So how can more countries benefit from what we are doing today in India, in a manner which builds the agency of the country to deliver better welfare for their people? To discuss this host Rathish Balakrishnan had an opportunity to speak to Professor S Rajagopalan for this episode of Decoding Impact.

Professor S Rajagopalan, is currently the president of MOSIP & OpenG2P, both housed under IIIT, Bangalore. He is an entrepreneur, teacher, advisor and advocate, and his subject matter expertise and interests include innovation dissemination, economics of innovations, Geographical Information systems, and Economics of Information Technologies.

Education is the Harry Potter of the social sector. Everybody loves it. Everybody puts money into it. Yet, why aren't we seeing sweeping outcomes?

As per the Annual Status of Education Report or ASER 2022, in India the enrolment rate for primary schools stands at the highest it has ever been in Indian education history at 98.4%. However, only 42.8% of grade five students are able to read at grade level text. Assessment and measuring foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) outcomes has been thrust to the forefront of understanding what the problems in education are today, so that they can be solved more effectively.

To discuss this and more on Decoding Impact, host Rathish Balakrishnan cuaght up with the CEO of Pratham Education Foundation, Dr. Rukmini Banerji.

Dr. Banerji is an accomplished educationist, who advocates for data-driven education reforms and she has spearheaded the development of notable large-scale assessments, including the widely recognised ASER.

Millets are often referred to as the crop of the future and India has been undergoing its own renaissance with this super food. Also, 2023 has been designated as the International Year of Millets by the UN, where India has been leading the discourse to develop the dialogue on millets globally.

The magic of millets holds the promise of unlocking a model of production that is good for us, the farmer, businesses, and good for the environment. In this podcast host Rathish Balakrishnan had the opportunity to speak to Mr. Sivakumar S, someone who deeply understands the Sarkar, the Samaj and the Bazaar of agriculture deeply with over 30 years of experience in the sector.

Mr. Sivakumar S is currently the group head of Agri and IT businesses at ITC Limited and is a member of its Corporate Management Committee. He also oversees ITC’s Sustainability and Social Investments programme. Mr. Sivakumar S has also been engaged as an advisor for the agricultural industry, at both a national and international level.

Digitalisation has already been a significant game changer for India's economy and society. Digital public infrastructure and digital public goods, or DPIs and DPGs,have emerged in the development ecosystem as a means to achieve population-scale social impact.

We have already seen the potential of DPIs with the success of Aadhar and UPI, solving for identity and payment transfer problems. While we will continue to hear about how additional value gets unlocked, there are 5+ DPIs brewing across the social development sector of education, health, skilling and livelihoods. So what does it take to unlock value from DPIs and DPGs as they emerge in other important and complex social sectors in India?

To discuss this in detail with us today, we have with us Dr. Pramod Varma who is the CTO of EkStep, a not-for-profit creating learner-centric, technology enabled platform aiming to provide learning opportunities to 200 million children in India. He was also the Chief Architect of Aadhaar, and various India stack layers such as eSign, Digital Locker, and Unified Payment Interface (UPI). He is a co-founder of FIDE and the genesis author of the open source Beckn protocol. Pramod is an adjunct faculty, he is the Co-Chair at the global Center for Digital Public Infrastructure at the IIIT-B helping other countries design and architect their own DPIs. He regularly speaks at technology conferences and is part of advisory groups of various national and international projects.

The planet is on the verge of exceeding the 1.5 centigrade limit established by the 2015 Paris Agreement, placing the issue of climate change front and centre for all of us today. On the other side of this crises are vulnerable nations, who have fewer resource to fight climate change, and are facing the double jeopardy of climate justice. In our next episode of Decoding Impact we explored the topic of Climate Finance - focusing on the intersection between finance and climate change, and discussing the role India can play in the global agenda. Finance has a crucial role to play to support three key pillars of mitigation, adaptation, and loss & damage, which are all actions that are necessary to address climate change. So how much money are we talking about? What institutional structures do we need to put in place to accelerate action? To discuss these questions and more in detail with us, we sat down with Mr. Varad Pande a climate finance and investment expert. Varad is currently a partner at BCG shaping their work in climate and sustainability.

India's G20 presidency is coming at a historic time. In the face of a mounting economic crisis, along with the demands placed by climate change, it is important for leading nations to pave a way for the world that is enduring and sustainable in the long term. 'Green growth' emerges as a critical priority, therefore, for the current G20 presidency.

As supply chains across the globe expand and evolve, the effect their operations have on the 3P’s - People, Planet and Profits, becomes increasingly complex.

 The effects on livelihoods are immense as more than 450 million people today are employed as a part of global supply chains, with a significant proportion of informal livelihoods depending on them. Supply chain operations result in over five times higher carbon emissions than the direct operations of corporations. More than 90% of biodiversity loss and water stress is today attributed to unsustainable extraction and processing of raw materials, fuels, and food. The good news is that there is also an increasing willingness for firms, especially agribusinesses, to make their supply chains more resilient and sustainable on all fronts – one major decision being procuring or sourcing raw materials for their products sustainably. However, there continue to be supply- and demand-side challenges.

The skilling landscape in India continues to be plagued by issues such as supply and demand mismatch of skilled personnel, limited training facilities and a lack of effective credentialing systems. 

The Digital Ecosystem for Skilling and Livelihood, or the DESH Stack e-portal has been launched with the aim to bring together stakeholders in one digital ecosystem, enabling easier discovery of opportunities and services and improving verification credibility through the digital skilling credentials of citizens.

In this episode of 'Decoding Impact', we have with us Mr. Satish Mohan, CTO and Co-founder, Dhiway. Satish takes us through the evolution of digital platforms, elaborating how the DESH Stack can facilitate credentialing, verifiability and discovery for citizens, helping them secure gainful employment.

According to PLFS 2021, a staggering 80% of women attribute their absence from the labour force to being engaged in domestic duties, making the unpaid labour economy a central theme for the discourse on women's economic participation in India.  

In this podcast episode, we try to understand the context of women and the unpaid labour economy in India, and why Indian women are less economically empowered than other countries in the Indian subcontinent. We deep-dive into the methods to understand it and address some of these challenges.   

Women account for 48% of India's population however, with only 19% of them being a part of the labour force, our country suffers from an alarmingly low female participation rate in the workforce.  

In this episode of Decoding Impact, we have Mitali Nikore as our guest speaker who is an economist, a gender policy specialist and the founder of the youth-led research group Nikore Associates. In our conversation with her, we elucidate why a country like India which is considered one of the potential superpowers of the world lags behind with its women still not as economically empowered as they should be.  

Through this dialogue, we unravel some key insights from recent important surveys like the PLFS and National Family and House Health Survey, explore themes like burdening societal expectations from women and discuss ways to make the situation better.

Micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) are creating 11.1 crore jobs in India, second only to the agricultural sector. However, they are plagued by an acute shortage of, and access to formal credit.

For this episode of Decoding Impact we will explore a potential solution for this in the form of technology, specifically the opportunities presented by the Open Credit Enablement Network, or OCEN. We explore how it can enable access to credit for MSMEs on a national scale.

We delve into the network itself, as well as the engagement with lenders, credit products, distribution engine, and finally, the role of philanthropy in accelerating its adoption. To have this conversation with us, we have Mr Hrushi Mehta, who is a Co-founder and Chief Evangelist at CredAll.

Small and marginal farmers comprise 85% of all the farmers in India. They are plagued by issues such as lack of bargaining power, credit taxes, unavailability of farm inputs and access to various government and private sector-led farm interventions. Farmer Producer Organisations (FPO) have the potential to address these issues and make agriculture viable for Indian farmers. FPOs have been around for the last twenty years, and recently we have seen exponential growth in their numbers.

However, the promise of FPOs, while exponential, is currently limited by a key factor. If the goal of doubling farmer incomes is to be achieved, it is necessary to find ways to build the capabilities of FPO leaders. Across the board, it has been acknowledged that building and finding this capability has been a challenge. To guide us through the myriad challenges that FPO capacity building entails, we have with us Mr Emmanual Murray for this episode of Decoding Impact. Mr Murray is currently working as an Investment Director at Caspian Equity, and is considered one of the most passionate and knowledgeable experts in the FPO ecosystem. 

In our conversation, we get a picture of the FPO landscape, the challenges that prevent the scaling up of FPOs, the quality of leaders needed for this ecosystem, the role of capital and some promises that these institutions hold for Indian farmers.

India is estimated to have 6.3 crore micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) that have the potential to flourish with innovative sales and marketing efforts, but are currently not part of the digital revolution.

In this episode of Decoding Impact, we will explore an upcoming digital platform and protocol, the Open Network for Digital Commerce, or ONDC, and how it will enable access and supply of digital markets to many MSMEs in India. To shed light on ONDC we have with us Mr Sujith Nair, who is the CEO and co-founder of Beckn Foundation. Through the discussion, we will not only understand ONDC itself, but also protocols and how these can change the interoperability between buyers and sellers. We also delve into the current maturity of the ecosystem, as well as the role philanthropy might be able to play to strengthen the ecosystem.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the distress, isolation, fear and anxiety that followed, mental health and well-being is a critical conversation that has arisen. India faces an acute mental health crisis. Mental morbidity affects over 1 in 7 Indians during their lifetime, at least one in five adults suffers from depression at some point in their life, and suicides are on the rise, with 12 deaths by suicide per lakh population in 2021. It is crucial for us, now more than ever, that we shift from a purely treatment-driven approach to ensuring holistic care, even at the primary healthcare level, by equipping individuals and communities with the right knowledge, and addressing the stigma which inhibits health-seeking behaviour for mental health.

In this episode of Decoding Impact, we are joined by Dr Soumitra Pathare, Consultant Psychiatrist and Director of the Centre of Mental Health Law and Policy, based at the Indian Law Society, Pune. Dr Pathare shares with us his views on understanding mental health and its socio-cultural nuances in the Indian context, barriers that limit mental health interventions, understanding the treatment gap and recommendations to solve mental health at the systemic level.

Three billion people the world over are experiencing the phenomenon of 'hidden hunger'. In India, approximately 80% of the farmers are small-holder farmers. In today's episode of Decoding Impact, we discuss a solution that has the potential to transform both of these: biofortification.  

The UN recently declared 2023 as the International Year of Millets, with the intent to build momentum for millet production and trade while heralding the benefits of nutrition, sustainability and economic empowerment for farmers. Furthermore, following the increased awareness about fitness and health that the pandemic ushered in, there is a resurgence in the popularity of superfood grains like foxtail millets, ragi, jowar and pearl millets. 

With this accruing global focus on solutions for health, well-being and farmer livelihoods, as well as the growing interest in climate change resilient practices in agriculture, there has arguably never been a better time to scale biofortification. In this episode of Decoding Impact, we are joined by Mr Ravinder Grover, the Programme Lead from Harvest Plus, who is an expert in the biofortification domain, and comes with extensive consulting experience. We discuss with him how the potential of agricultural produce, including the superfood millets, can be accelerated through the agricultural treatment and application of biofortification. Ravinder unpacks for us what biofortification is, how it can make grains climate change-resilient, how farmers can benefit, the practical application of biofortification and the trade-offs and barriers to scaling this agricultural practice in India and globally.