The government has a plan to reach welfare to the poor without wasting money. It wants to put hard cash in their hands instead of spending on welfare programmes. To begin with, it wants to end the public distribution system of food grain and give money directly to the people. Its logic: the new system of cash transfer will plug leakages and save an enormous amount of money. But is it...

Five years is a short period but the achievements are awesome. About ten crore poorest of India’s poor have opened personal accounts in banks or post offices; people demand work because it is their right; it has already regenerated ponds and water bodies and other community assets in thousands of villages; men and women get equal wages for equal work and ordinary people have a right to audit development works...

When we hear the word innovation, we often think of new technologies or silver bullet solutions — like hydrogen fuel cells or a cure for cancer. To be sure, breakthroughs are vital: antibiotics and vaccines, for example, transformed global health. But as we’ve argued in Fixes, some of the greatest advances come from taking old ideas or technologies and making them accessible to millions of people who are underserved. One area...

No celebrity visits or satellite banking system? Never mind, bring on ‘suppat’. Unlike Doba, three other villages of Lohardaga district may not have been lucky enough to get Reserve Bank of India’s smart card based satellite-banking system. But they have a ‘suppat’ surprise up their sleeves. ‘Suppat’ or ‘super’ in tribal dialect, is also the name of a rural chain of mom-and-pop stores initiated by a private party, Dynamic Tarang Pvt Ltd,...

Farmer Dharamshyam Kujur put the hitherto nondescript village of Doba in Kudu block of Lohardaga district on the banking map of India today as he withdrew Rs 100 from his newly opened account. Watching him create history was Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor D. Subbarao, who, as part of RBI’s ambitious outreach programme aimed at financial inclusion, inaugurated a smart card-based satellite banking system in the village earlier in the...