India has led the world in its use of public payment architecture, first in the introduction of direct benefit transfers and Aadhaar-based payments, and now through its increasingly integrated data and digital infrastructure. While the first generation of payment innovations focused on digitization, the next one must go beyond this. As India’s data and digital infrastructure becomes increasingly integrated, the opportunity exists to build systems that do not merely transfer money or information, but actively support citizens and busy government officials – resolving grievances, ensuring transparency and communication at appropriate levels, enabling adaptive learning across programmes, and placing data governance and accountability at the centre of design.
On 21 May 2026, Inclusion Economics India Centre (IEIC) convened a half-day roundtable in New Delhi bringing together approximately 20 researchers, implementing organisations, and development partners to reflect on a decade of evidence on digital payments in India’s social protection system — and to ask what comes next. With MGNREGA now transitioning to the Viksit Bharat Gramin Rozgar Guarantee Mission (VB-G RAM G), the conversation was timely: what have we learned about making payments smarter, and how do we carry those lessons into the next generation of the system?
The evidence: ten years of insights from government-linked digital innovation
Dr. Charity Troyer Moore (Scientific Director, India, Inclusion Economics at Yale) presented a decade of findings from IEIC’s research on PayDash, a digital application that helps district and block-level officials track and expedite MGNREGS worker payments.The partnership behind it began in 2013, made possible by the Ministry of Rural Development’s own significant investments in MGNREGA’s data systems. A randomized evaluation across 75 districts of Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand, later replicated in Bihar, found that PayDash substantially improved program delivery. Payment processing times fell by 16% — with the largest gains in the pre-monsoon lean season, when a reliable safety net matters most. Households worked approximately 10% more days and officers with access to PayDash were transferred less often than their peers. By a conservative estimate, the first-year benefits outweighed the costs of building and running the application many times over.
Yet some of the most important lessons through this decade of experimentation and government partnership were lessons about how to take evidence-backed solutions from pilot to scale. Dr Troyer Moore highlighted four core principles: embed, don’t scale; be content with incremental progress; be present at strategic junctures; and do not forget about last-mile frictions. These principles informed the research team’s continued partnership with policymakers in the Ministry of Rural Development to ensure that the PayDash application was accessible to officials and households across India. As of February 2026, the Paydash module was launched in an government-owned application known as “RuralOne”, which aims to reach citizens across India. In July 2026, the PayDash module will also be launched in a nationwide update of Janmanrega, a digital application designed for citizens, which has millions of existing users. Through both of these digital products, PayDash features have the potential to expedite social protection payments for over 50 million households annually.
Shared Insights and Experiences: Building Trusted Digital Innovations
A lightning round of presentations from six organisations illustrated both the breadth of challenges and the range of innovations being tested in digital payments and services delivery. IDinsight’s Benefits AI is targeting awareness and intermediary empowerment — building tools for frontline workers to navigate India’s 5,000+ social schemes on behalf of citizens. eGov Foundation is working on infrastructure for informal workers, creating verifiable work histories that workers own and carry across engagements. MicroSave has focused on implementing Smart Payment Solutions to improve intergovernmental payments and reduce interest burdens. Indus Action is building a unified portal to reduce the burden on citizens navigating multiple government interfaces. Samagra is addressing the “plumbing” beneath delivery systems, supporting a family-level unique ID that enables proactive, eligibility-based targeting and enrollment for efficient scheme delivery. Across presentations, a common thread emerged: the hardest problems often are not technical, but instead relational — building trust between departments, between the state and citizens, and between data systems that do not yet speak to each other.
Future learnings: the next generation of “smart payments” innovation
The closing discussions turned from what has worked to where the shared opportunities lie. Several themes cut across organizations. The first was that deepening a tool into a government system is itself a powerful form of scale — embedding and scaling need not be opposed, and the most durable innovations are those a state comes to see as its own. The second was the value of interoperability: much of the promise ahead lies in helping siloed data systems speak to one another, so that a citizen’s eligibility or work history can move with them across programs. The third was a shared aspiration to design toward inclusion — recognizing that administrative records and lived reality can diverge, and systems attentive to that gap can reach people whom the data alone would miss. One especially generative idea drew on India’s own experience opening IndiaStack to spur private-sector innovation, with participants asking how comparable openness in the public sector might invite a wider community of problem-solvers to strengthen service delivery. A related opportunity lay in process design itself: As systems mature, there is room to move from approving payments one by one toward agreeing in advance on clear, shared criteria for release — an approach that could streamline disbursement and give officials well-defined, auditable standards to act on with greater confidence.
Participants left having taken stock of a decade of work in progress across the field, and having been challenged by new ideas as they continue to strengthen India’s digital infrastructure in service of its most vulnerable populations. These themes also point to where the opportunities for collaboration and research are richest: as the transition to VB–G RAM G reshapes existing processes, there is a unique opening to strengthen the underlying data systems, feedback mechanisms, and governance on which good delivery depends — and every organization in the room has a role to play in building the evidence and impact that will guide it. IEIC set out to take stock of a decade of evidence and to chart a path forward by opening the conversations and partnerships that will carry this work into its next chapter.
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