Independent Research and Policy Advocacy

Aishwarya Narayan Dvara

Aishwarya Narayan

Research Associate
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Aishwarya Narayan is a Research Associate at Dvara Research. She is passionate about building welfare systems that are equitably accessible for all and redistributive in nature. Aishwarya’s areas of research and advocacy include digitisation in social protection, last-mile delivery systems, and grievance redressal mechanisms in digital finance and social protection. An overarching theme across her research are the methods to unlock easy access to government and financial services for the most marginalised citizen. 

Aishwarya holds a Master’s in Applied Economics from the National University of Singapore. Before her role at Dvara, she was a Research Associate at the Asia Competitiveness Institute, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. 

Focus policy initiatives

Social Protection Initiative

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Contact: aishwarya.narayan@dvara.com

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March 31, 2023 | Dvara Research

In this interim report, we document our observations about the user interface of In-App GRMs in UPI applications (UPI Apps). Our observations are based on our review of the customer redress journey on these GRMs – mainly in terms of the GRM’s accessibility and usability – from the lens of a low-income, digital immigrant customer.

By Aishwarya Narayan, Srikara Prasad
March 29, 2023 | Dvara Research

In this blog post, we collate evidence of the various reasons that prevent the BC network from offering access to reliable CICO services all over the country. We rely on a mix of evidence in the form of qualitative case studies, survey results, and secondary sources.

March 6, 2023 | Dvara Research

Technological advancement is enabling governments to break away from this fragmented model and adopt an approach that allows individual departments to share infrastructural capacities. In policy parlance, this new approach is referred to as an ‘ecosystem-based’ delivery model, wherein several government departments are integrated at the back end, operate on the same platform, with their workflows interoperable with each other.

By Aishwarya Narayan, Lakshay Narang, Aarushi Gupta, Beni Chugh, Dr. Indradeep Ghosh
December 12, 2022 | ThePrint

'JAM' trinity facilitates direct benefit transfers of welfare subsidies into bank accounts of poor, but teething issues have kept the programme from realising its true potential.

November 14, 2022 | ThePrint

Any digital system built to deliver social protection to citizens must accentuate the benefits of digitisation for citizens while suppressing any harm to them.

By Lakshay Narang, Aishwarya Narayan
September 14, 2022 | Moneycontrol

The delivery infrastructure that supports social protection is in serious need of upheaval and is fraught with issues such as paucity of access points, operational issues causing transaction failure, and unethical activities like fraud.

August 26, 2022 | Moneycontrol

More than half the payment failures may be due to incorrect Aadhaar details, or bank accounts that are wrongly flagged as inactive

July 4, 2022 | Dvara Research

Our recently concluded State of Exclusion study finds that payment failures during the back-end processing of a Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) payment are a significant concern. In this blog piece, we highlight the broad takeaways to help the reader better understand the landscape of payment failures.We also set out some broad recommendations to be taken into consideration by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to improve the chances of a successful DBT payment.

June 7, 2022 | ThePrint

Large-scale scams in PM-Kisan suggest there's vast leakage in DBT advantages. While inclusion errors are being tracked, exclusion should take priority.

January 5, 2022 | Dvara Research

The social protection landscape in India is transforming at rapid speed owing to the digitization of the various systems that are involved in the process flow of social protection delivery.