From the macro to the micro and everything in between, in this episode of Decoding Impact, Manish Sabharwal illuminates the economics of India's current job market and the systemic levers needed to thrust India into grasping its full potential as an economy, society and nation. As one of the foremost experts on India's job market and the plight of Education in India today, Manish shares his expert insights, critical frameworks, and orbit-shifting views on how India can address its challenges at ...
Nov 26, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Season 3Ep. 11
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...
Sep 19, 2024•1 hr
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 collectiv...
Aug 14, 2024•1 hr 20 min•Season 3Ep. 9
Get to know more about our latest guests featured on Decoding Impact, Akhil JP & Arun Vinayak, through this revealing rapid fire! Listen to the latest episode of Decoding Impact!: 🔴 Youtube 🟣 Apple Podcast 🔵 Amazon 🔗 Website...
Aug 01, 2024•2 min
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 ensu...
Jul 18, 2024•1 hr 31 min•Season 3Ep. 8
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 ...
Jun 29, 2024•1 hr 23 min•Season 3Ep. 7
Get to know more about our latest guest featured on Decoding Impact, Prachi Windlass, through this revealing rapid fire! Listen to the latest episode of Decoding Impact!: 🔴 Youtube 🟣 Apple Podcast 🔵 Amazon 🔗 Website...
Jun 28, 2024•3 min
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 ...
Jun 15, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Season 3Ep. 6
Get to know more about our latest guest featured on Decoding Impact, Anil Swarup , through this revealing rapid fire! Listen to the latest episode of Decoding Impact!: 🔴 Youtube 🟣 Apple Podcast 🔵 Amazon 🔗 Website...
Jun 14, 2024•3 min
"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 compl...
Jun 01, 2024•57 min•Season 3Ep. 5
Get to know more about our latest guest featured on Decoding Impact, Neelkanth Mishra , through this revealing rapid fire! Listen to the latest episode of Decoding Impact!: 🔴 Youtube 🟣 Apple Podcast 🔵 Amazon 🔗 Website...
May 25, 2024•2 min
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 ...
May 18, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Season 3Ep. 4
Get to know more about our latest guest featured on Decoding Impact, Ramraj Pai , through this revealing rapid fire! Listen to the latest episode of Decoding Impact!: 🔴 Youtube 🟣 Apple Podcast 🔵 Amazon 🔗 Website...
May 14, 2024•4 min
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? In this latest episode of Decoding Impact we explore the topic of Blended Finance as a p...
May 04, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Season 3Ep. 3
Get to know more about our latest guest featured on Decoding Impact, Mr. Kaushal Jaiswal, through this revealing rapid fire! Listen to the latest episode of Decoding Impact!: 🔴 Youtube 🟣 Apple Podcast 🔵 Amazon 🔗 Website...
Apr 27, 2024•3 min
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-irr...
Apr 18, 2024•1 hr•Season 3Ep. 2
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. In the first episode of season 3 of Decodin...
Apr 05, 2024•1 hr•Season 3Ep. 1
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. 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 acr...
Oct 27, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Season 2Ep. 12
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...
Oct 10, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Season 2Ep. 11
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. ...
Sep 15, 2023•55 min•Season 2Ep. 10
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...
Sep 08, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Season 2Ep. 9
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 t...
Aug 25, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Season 2Ep. 8
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 Rathis...
Aug 18, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 2Ep. 7
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 financ...
Jul 31, 2023•56 min•Season 2Ep. 6
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 thru...
Jul 14, 2023•59 min•Season 2Ep. 5
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 opport...
Jun 30, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 2Ep. 4
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 th...
Jun 16, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Season 2Ep. 3
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 discussi...
Jun 06, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Season 2Ep. 2
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. What is India's vision for green growth? And how is it steering this conversation globally? In the first episode of Decoding Impact Season Two, we are...
May 19, 2023•26 min•Season 2Ep. 1
In the last few years, digital health has emerged as a potential game changer for enabling accessible, affordable, and quality health care for all. The pandemic has only emphasised the role of digital health as a key enabler to achieve universal health coverage. In spite of the high potential of digital health, the urban-rural divide, the digital divide, the low economic social conditions and the low return on investment deprive the underserved populations of its benefits. In order to scale and ...
Mar 10, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 11
