Tarun Cherukuri

Tarun Cherukuri has the vision to streamline a complex system of entitlements in India, focusing on improving outcomes for the poorest families and ensuring that the government entitlements serve as a protective safety net for them at the critical moments of life transitions, such as having children, sending them to school, losing a source of income and health emergencies.

India's welfare and entitlements system suffers from several shortcomings that prevent millions of dollars from reaching the intended beneficiaries. According to a 2017 World Bank report, between 30% to 40% of India's total welfare spending may not reach the intended recipients, highlighting a significant opportunity to improve the efficiency of India's social protection system.

Tarun recognizes that benefits and entitlements are critical for vulnerable families during significant life transitions, such as childbirth, accessing educational opportunities, losing a source of family income, experiencing health emergencies, disability, and retirement. Through his organization, Indus Action, Tarun is streamlining the delivery of a Portfolio of Welfare Entitlements or Rights (POWER) for the same family, following the example of global best practices in countries such as Brazil and Mexico. These countries have successfully consolidated benefits portfolios under one umbrella program. Using this approach, which is new in India, Indus Action is organizing entitlements into a portfolio of 4-5 high-value entitlements. The organization uses existing legislative mandates and current state capacity levels to prioritize these entitlements and their last-mile distribution by the government.

India has a complex web of around 500 welfare entitlements and schemes. This vast number of programs makes it challenging for the government to effectively manage and implement them and for the families to know what they are entitled to and how to access them.

As a result, according to the National Family Health Survey, only 22% of eligible households in India received at least one type of government benefit in 2019-20. The system is complex, with several hundred policies and entitlements that can be confusing and difficult to navigate for citizens. For instance, a study by Accountability Initiative, a research organization, found that only 14% of surveyed households in rural areas and 38% in urban areas were aware of the government's flagship Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) program in 2017-18.

Consolidating welfare entitlements could help streamline the delivery process, reduce administrative costs, and make it easier for the beneficiaries to understand and access the benefits available to them. Furthermore, a more streamlined approach could help prioritize high-impact interventions, ensuring that the most vulnerable families receive the necessary support across the country. A successful example of such consolidation can be seen in Brazil's "Bolsa Familia" program, which has effectively combined various welfare programs into a single, coordinated effort.

Currently the poor design of processes and lack of coordination between various schemes and departments responsible for them leads to duplication of efforts and lengthy, tedious application processes that discourage the poor from accessing the benefits. This also encourages corruption at various levels as the system lacks transparency and accountability, allowing middlemen to siphon off resources intended for the poor.

In its “Strategy for New India @ 75,” the Indian government Think Tank NITI Aayog has emphasized the need for adopting user-centric approaches to implementing government schemes. The strategy proposes getting more insights and feedback from beneficiaries to improve services, simplifying existing programs to improve penetration, using technology to facilitate faster and seamless access to benefits, and building the capacity of state governments in collaboration with civil society to deliver services to the population.

Focusing on the delivery of the POWER portfolio, Indus Action is enabling a more effective system of delivering welfare entitlements in India. By focusing on several critical entitlements over 500 others, Indus Action can help the government at various levels to prioritise the implementation of those policies that have the most impact on poor families. Indus Action is working with the government and civil society to simplify the processes so citizens become aware and can easily access what they are entitled to, while supporting the government to refine the design of the delivery mechanisms of the strategically selected schemes in the POWER portfolio.

Indus Action, which takes a very intentional role of an enabler and not of an implementer, is building the capacity of the State governments to design and implement these entitlement programs with a user-centric approach removing practical barriers that prevent people from accessing benefits. Once the practical bottlenecks of access are resolved, Indus Action engages civil society organizations and existing government structures to scale up the utilization of the scheme across the state. With this approach, Indus Action plans to unlock 150 million USD in government spending by 2025.

The organization's intervention is best described as action research, helping citizens access the benefits they are entitled to by law. Indus Action has performed and scaled its intervention on the implementation of the Right to Education Act and is in the process of devising its approach in the Right to Livelihood and Maternity benefits areas.

State Governments already have the machinery to deliver the schemes to the population but lack the capabilities to refine the processes from the user perspective, which results in a huge backlog of grievances and underutilization. That is Indus Action’s entry point. They analyse the grievance logs and data and identify the patterns in the failures of the process, armed with this data, they can demonstrate to the concerned departments how small fixes can unlock the implementation of the policy. This is a compelling proposition for the officials, who see Indus Action as their ally in helping them achieve impressive outcomes.

When partnering with a particular state to implement a scheme, Indus Action undertakes ground-up research to identify bottlenecks and process flows that prevent citizens from receiving benefits. The organization then proposes design solutions to the state government and supports the implementation process of these suggestions. Some challenges in the implementation of policies are seemingly trivial, such as a lengthy application process, compulsory repetitive submission of documents, or lack of awareness among the target population about the scheme. However, small design flaws at the population scale can lead to massive exclusion and underutilization. By asking simple user-centric questions such as how long does it take to fill the application? How many screens and clicks it takes to submit the application? Can the verification happen with existing data? Where can people find information about the entitlement and apply? Indus Action can uncover process flaws and streamline access at the first mile.

For example, the Delhi Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Board (DBOCWWB) is a government department that provides welfare and social security measures for registered construction workers in the Delhi region. An assessment conducted by Indus Action showed that only 50,000 construction workers were registered annually. Indus Action worked with the board to redesign process flows, simplify the application process, reduce the price of obtaining registration for the worker, work with the IT department to develop an online portal for applications, launch a 24/7 helpline, and organize hyper-local enrolment camps. All these efforts resulted in the number of registered workers in 2022 increasing to 1.1 million, achieving a 100% saturation and giving them access to free bus transportation, grants for pension, maternity benefits, injury and death insurance, and sponsorship for children's education.

Indus Action selects schemes to work on with state governments based on return on investment, the political will to implement the policy, and adjacency to existing Indus Action work. Indus Action internally evaluates new opportunities based on these parameters, before starting a new partnership. The model is to build, operate and transfer the implementation to the concerned authorities, so the buy-in from the state government is an essential starting point. There must be the will and commitment from those in charge to improve the delivery of schemes.

The intervention that is most mature, and demonstrates the importance and impact of this approach, is the implementation of the Right to Education Act, particularly a section that guarantees the admission of underprivileged children into private schools. Indus Action has worked with 20 out of 28 states in India on the implementation of this Act. The organization analysed why the policy was not being implemented and found a lack of transparency in the process, easy hijacking, and it was very hard for parents to apply for seats. Working with the State government of Delhi, Indus Action devised an online portal and automated system of election that made it easier for parents to apply and for the government to track the process. In 2021, Indus Action work in 20 states facilitated the admission of 240,000 children with an 81% retention.

The model of transferring know-how to states has been more successful in some states, while other states have taken longer to transition. For instance, the state administration of Orissa and Uttarakhand, impressed by the results of Indus Action results and delivered value, decided to reimburse all costs the organization incurred for the execution of the program in these states.

Indus Action sees itself as an enabler, not an implementer, and works closely with local civil society in each state. It engages with local citizen sector organizations that can carry forward the work once the systems are in place. Based on their experience, having a few early adopters in citizen actors locally of the process builds confidence in people that the scheme is working efficiently and provides benefits. This can lead to increased adoption among the actors involved. Indus Action strategically selects and collaborates with the CSOs with a local presence, such as Mobile Creches, Jan Sahas, Pratham, Save the Children and many others. These organizations have an interest in making these schemes available to their beneficiaries, and as soon as bottlenecks are removed, they quickly drive adoption and outreach to the most vulnerable communities.

Indus Action also activates young people as fellows to mobilize local communities and the citizen sector around improving access to benefits. The organization selects a small number of young people from communities where they work to be the “barefoot user-centric design experts”, these young people while campaigning locally and getting more people to apply for the schemes are trained to identify and share with Indus Action insights on the persisting challenges and bottlenecks. Indus Action creates a deliberate learning ladder from being a campaign volunteer to setting up their own local community organizations. Indus Action's multidisciplinary team comprising sociologists, lawyers, and technologists plays a hands-on role in training and empowering these upcoming leaders.

Moving forward, Indus Action will focus on expanding its POWER portfolio by identifying relevant additional schemes to include. In the initial years, Indus Action had to exert a considerable amount of effort to persuade states to collaborate with them. However, as the results begin to demonstrate the effectiveness of their work, more states express interest in expanding their partnership with Indus Action on other schemes. Indus Action is highly selective about the schemes it engages in to ensure that they are making progress towards consolidating the POWER portfolio in more states.

Tarun spent his early years living with his grandmother in a village located in the Andhra Pradesh state of South India. His father worked as a public sector employee, enrolling people in public sector insurance schemes. From a young age, Tarun learned about the challenges faced by government employees and developed an empathetic insight into the systems needed to support their critical work in reaching out to first-mile communities.

Tarun's parents and grandmother were determined to give him and his brother the best possible education and had them admitted to the best private school in the area. They instilled in them a strong sense of responsibility to do well in their jobs and support the family in the future. With his excellent academic track record and high-level competitive performance in badminton, Tarun secured scholarships to pursue a secondary school education and later an engineering degree from BITS Pilani. He has always been inclined to lead and enjoyed taking on responsibility, taking on many leadership roles during college.

Tarun was since very early age deeply aware of how fortunate he was to have the opportunities to study and do well. He felt a sense of duty to contribute to the aspirational idea of India, a country where all people are living better lives. After college, Tarun joined Hindustan Unilever, convinced that running a big and successful business would be his contribution to India's prosperity. However, a few years later, he began to question this assumption and felt he could make a bigger difference if he pursued other avenues.

His grandmother's passing was a trigger for him to determinately decide that he had to find a more productive way to spend his life and help his country. Despite objections from his parents and family, who had hoped he would have a prosperous and successful career, Tarun left Hindustan Unilever and joined Teach for India as a fellow. He pursued a master's degree in public administration from Harvard Kennedy School. While in school he organized a working group to help identify most strategic opportunities for change in India, where access to benefits came up.

When Tarun returned to India, he accepted an offer from Teach for India, to support himself financially, while agreeing with them that he would in parallel pursue his work. Tarun decided to focus on the access to education policy and organized 1000 volunteers to help fill out the application forms for poor families. However, seeing the abysmally small number of children who got admission, he realized the access problem needs to be fixed from the point of the design of the policy implementation and not at the level of beneficiaries. And that was the start of Indus Action.