Publications

Engaging the Private Sector in Urban Sanitation Services – A Review of South Asian Cities

Sujatha Srinivasan | November 19, 2018

In 2017, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation commissioned a rapid review of the South Asia regional portfolio of BMGF/DFID comprising of city projects on public-private partnerships in urban sanitation delivery. This report presents a synthesis of findings and lessons … Read More

Building Hooks and Ladders: A Case for Integrating Digital Payments and Lending to Small Merchants

John Arun, Ankur Gautam | September 1, 2018

This report presents insights from a study conducted for informing the credit operations of the Catalyst initiative at IFMR. The scoping study was commissioned for assessing the credit needs of micromerchants and understanding whether credit products can be used as … Read More

Mapping the Merchant’s Mind: An Analysis of Digital Payment Behaviors by Fixed Store Merchants in Jaipur

Badal Malick, Rajesh Shukla, Megha Shree, Vaisnavi Gnanasekaran, Pratibha Joshi, Harsh Nisar | September 1, 2018

This report by Catalyst and People Research on India’s Consumer Economy (PRICE) provides a deeper context on small business profiles, infrastructure, needs, behaviors, and perceptions based on a large sample survey. The study focuses on small merchants with fixed establishments, … Read More

PayNearby: Towards a Hyperlocal Fintech Network

Catalyst | September 1, 2018

PayNearby is a start-up that aims to create the world’s largest hyperlocal fintech network in India, by enabling existing corner shops to become digital financial service hubs. In this piece, co-founder Anand Bajaj shares Paynearby’s experience in working with micro-merchants … Read More

FINGPAY: Fostering Bare-pocket Transactions

Catalyst | September 1, 2018

Fingpay, a biometrics-based payments platform, seeks to facilitate seamless transactions without the need for customers to carry cash, cards, or phones on them. In this piece, co-founder of Fingpay, Pratyush Halen, shares insights from Fingpay’s journey in digitising payments using … Read More

In BHIM We Trust

Catalyst | September 1, 2018

This field story captures the experience of small merchants in adopting and using the BHIM UPI application. Merchants were onboarded to the BHIM QR code platform as part of Catalyst’s experiments to test strategies for enabling digital payment adoption in … Read More

Unlocking Finance for Small Merchants – from Digital Data to Digital Credit

Catalyst | September 1, 2018

Digitizing merchant can payments generate data trails that can be used by financial service provider to assess the credit worthiness of small merchants. This field story captures insights from a Catalyst experiment in which micromerchants were provided with a Point … Read More

Age just a Number when it Comes to Digital Payments

Catalyst | September 1, 2018

This field story captures insights on customer experiences with transacting digitally at e-Mitra outlets. These outlets provide a range of government and private sector services, from bill payments to college admissions, through kiosks.

Conservation Agriculture: Documenting Adoption across the Gangetic Plains of India

Anil Bhargava, Camille Boudot, Andre Butle, Guillaume Chomé, Khushboo Gupta Senior, Rupika Singh, Urs Schulthess | March 7, 2018

Research efforts of the CGIAR have since been instrumental in adapting CA practices to cropping systems found across the developing world. This report presents findings from a study that rigorously evaluates the adoption of CA within the intensive rice-wheat cropping … Read More

Early Stage Assessment of Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana

IFMR LEAD | March 6, 2018

This report presents insights from an early stage assessment of the Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana, conducted by LEAD and Dvara Research.