Leadership quotes on India’s 2026 Union Budget announcement:
Abhishek Anand, Senior Partner – Banking Financial Services and Insurance, on “The Daily Jagran”
“Refinancing ease for NBFC-MFIs is important for micro enterprise growth and the ultimate growth of the Viksit Bharat goal ahead.”
Vikash Sinha, Associate Partner – Climate Change and Sustainability, on “India CSR”
“Climate adaptation needs dedicated local provisions and said the allocation of INR 1.4 lakh crore under the 16th Finance Commission is commendable and strengthens fiscal federalism. Also, climate resilience requires dedicated provisions for locally led adaptation mechanisms that can crowd in private innovation and investment.”
Puneet Khanduja, Associate Partner – Health and Nutrition, on “Money control”
“Such announcements create a strong platform for systemic reforms. However, their impact will depend on effective state-level implementation, regulatory alignment, and integrated models that translate policy intent into actionable institutional expansion.”
Rajnish Kumar, Senior Manager – Agriculture and Food System, on “Nuffoods Spectrum”
“The Union Budget 2026–27 signals a decisive shift toward productivity-led agricultural growth. The emphasis on integrated fisheries and livestock value chains, development of 500 reservoirs and Amrit Sarovar lakes, and AI-enabled productivity through Bharat Vistaar with AgriStack–ICAR integration aligns well with the Economic Survey’s diagnosis. The real test will be rapid execution and demonstrable gains in productivity and farm incomes.”
Ayushi Mishra, Senior Manager – Communities and Livelihoods, on “Business world”
“Diversification must extend beyond crops to livelihoods. Aligning community livelihoods with climate-resilient agriculture could transform sustainability into a scalable economic strategy. Integrating self-help groups into formal value chains and promoting green jobs could strengthen rural resilience while aligning growth with India’s climate commitments.”
Rajarshi Dutta Barua, Associate Partner – Banking Financial Services and Insurance, on “CNBC”
“The ₹10,000 crore SME Growth Fund is a decisive intervention to create future champions by providing equity support and risk capital to promising MSMEs. It addresses critical equity gaps that prevent small enterprises from scaling globally and can be strengthened through faster settlements on platforms like TReDS and expanded credit guarantee coverage for first-time women and marginalised entrepreneurs.”
As the Union Budget for 2026–27 approaches, agriculture has been articulated as the first engine of development. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (2023–24), agriculture and allied activities employ 46.1 per cent of India’s workforce, underscoring the sector’s centrality to livelihoods, food security, and rural demand. The question before policymakers, however, is not one of intent or aggregate spending, but of whether budgetary choices are aligned with the sector’s structural needs.
Budgetary allocations to the Department of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare (DA&FW) have expanded significantly in nominal terms, from ₹21,933 crore in FY 2013–14 to ₹1.27 lakh crore in the Budget Estimates for FY 2025–26. Agriculture-related spending also flows through multiple ministries, covering irrigation, renewable energy, fertilisers, rural employment, and research. This reflects sustained fiscal attention and an increasingly whole-of-government approach.
However, relative prioritisation tells a different story. DA&FW’s share in the total Central Plan outlay has declined steadily, from 3.53 per cent in 2021–22 to 2.51 per cent in 2025–26. Actual expenditure has frequently undershot budget estimates, particularly during fiscally constrained years. While allocations remain large, agriculture’s relative weight within the expanding public expenditure framework is diminishing.
Persistent productivity challenge
This trend is significant because Indian agriculture continues to face a persistent productivity challenge. Despite employing nearly half the workforce, the sector contributes less than one-fifth of GDP and exhibits lower growth than the rest of the economy. Incremental increases in outlays, without changes in spending composition, are unlikely to alter this imbalance.
A review of recent budgets shows a continued concentration of resources in income support, input subsidies, and risk mitigation schemes. PM-KISAN, for instance, has improved income predictability and strengthened direct state–farmer linkages through digital transfers. The expansion of Aadhaar-linked delivery systems and the rollout of AgriStack represent genuine improvements in targeting, transparency, and administrative capacity. These initiatives have strengthened the welfare architecture and merit acknowledgement.
But welfare efficiency is not the same as productivity enhancement. The binding constraints in Indian agriculture lie in weak seed systems, inefficient water use, deteriorating soil health, limited extension capacity, post-harvest losses, and poor market integration. Budgetary priorities continue to underweight these productivity-enhancing public goods relative to recurring expenditures.
Complementing with sustained budgetary support
Seed systems provide a useful illustration. Yield stagnation across several crops reflects slow varietal turnover, uneven quality assurance, and limited diffusion of improved genetics. The draft Seed Bill recognises this institutional gap by proposing reforms to certification, quality control, and innovation incentives. However, regulatory reform must be complemented by sustained budgetary support for agricultural research, adaptive trials, extension networks, and farmer adoption to generate measurable gains.
Risk mitigation schemes show a similar pattern. Crop insurance and credit-linked support absorb substantial resources but remain constrained by delayed settlements, uneven coverage, and weak alignment with actual production risks. Without complementary investments in irrigation, climate-resilient practices, and localised extension, these schemes function primarily as ex-post compensation rather than ex-ante resilience-building tools.
Input subsidies, including fertiliser support, further illustrate the tension. While digital monitoring has improved transparency, distorted price signals continue to encourage inefficient input use and impose high fiscal costs. Policy discourse increasingly recognises the need for rationalisation, but progress remains incremental. Reform must be sequenced and linked to productivity, soil health, and income outcomes, not treated as a narrow fiscal correction.
Public investment gaps
Public investment gaps are most evident in post-harvest infrastructure, storage, processing, logistics, and value-chain integration. Persistent post-harvest losses, particularly in horticulture, livestock, and fisheries, continue to erode farm incomes. Instruments such as the Agriculture Infrastructure Fund have demonstrated demand, but their effectiveness depends on last-mile execution and stronger integration with farmer producer organisations and markets.
The broader lesson is clear. India has built an extensive safety net for agriculture, but a weak ladder for growth. Digital public infrastructure such as AgriStack offers an opportunity to rebalance this approach, enabling differentiated support, outcome-linked incentives, and accountability. But technology cannot substitute for strategic prioritisation.
If agriculture is truly to serve as India’s engine of development, the Budget must signal a shift, from income support to income generation, from fragmented schemes to coherent value-chain strategies, and from managing distress to enabling productivity-led growth. This does not require dramatically higher spending. It requires sharper choices. The foundations are in place. What is needed now is strategic follow-through.
This was first published in “The Hindu” on 31st January 2026.
As the Union Budget 2026 approaches, the national discourse is increasingly anchored in the vision of Viksit Bharat 2047. For the health sector, this ambition now requires a clear shift from a primary focus on infrastructure expansion to the creation of a technology-enabled, patient-centric health ecosystem.
Budget 2026 must be framed as a health systems budget, not a healthcare spending budget. The required shift is from fragmented funding to predictable financing, from service expansion to system resilience, from treatment dominance to prevention and early detection, from technology pilots to national digital infrastructure, and from cost containment to innovation-led competitiveness.
India’s recent public health gains are significant. The elimination of trachoma in 2024 and the decline in the total fertility rate to 1.9 reflect decades of sustained investment and reform. The next phase of transformation must build on this foundation by enabling a second revolution: the large-scale integration of digital public infrastructure and artificial intelligence into public health delivery.
The digital mandate: universalising health data systems
A core expectation from Budget 2026 is accelerated saturation and deepening of the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission. While over 84 crore Ayushman Bharat Health Accounts have been created, the true value of ABDM lies in interoperability rather than registration alone. Budgetary support is required to integrate vertical programmes—from maternal and child health to tuberculosis and non-communicable diseases—into a unified digital stack.
Interoperable patient records are essential to ensure that medical histories move seamlessly across levels of care, from rural sub-centres to district hospitals and tertiary facilities. At the same time, the success of eSanjeevani, which has enabled more than 44 crore teleconsultations, demonstrates both demand and feasibility. The next step is to expand specialist tele-services, including tele-radiology and AI-assisted diagnostics, to reduce diagnostic delays in underserved regions.
Artificial intelligence: fromlogisticsto life-saving care
Artificial intelligence is emerging as a critical enabler of efficiency and responsiveness within the health system. Budget 2026 offers an opportunity to support pilots and scale initiatives that embed AI into core public health functions.
One priority area is supply chain management. AI-based demand forecasting within drug and vaccine distribution systems can reduce stock-outs and wastage, improving service continuity and planning. Another important frontier is drone-enabled logistics. Scaling drone-based delivery of vaccines, diagnostics, and emergency medicines to remote and hilly regions is no longer experimental; it is essential for achieving health equity in hard-to-reach geographies.
Addressing the triple burden: NCDs and cancer care
India’s epidemiological transition has made the rising burden of non-communicable diseases a pressing fiscal and policy concern. Budget allocations must reflect this shift, particularly for cancer and chronic disease care.
Decentralized cancer treatment should be prioritised. Operationalising day care cancer centres in district hospitals would significantly reduce travel burdens and treatment disruptions for patients requiring chemotherapy. In parallel, preventive care must be strengthened. Expanding population-level screening beyond diabetes and hypertension to include conditions such as chronic kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and fatty liver disease, especially among younger populations, will be critical to preventing long-term health and productivity losses.
Building a climate-resilient health system
Climate change is increasingly influencing disease patterns and service disruptions. Budget 2026 must respond by investing in climate-resilient and energy-efficient health facilities. Integrating climate risk assessments into existing maternal and child health programmes will be essential to strengthen preparedness for heat stress, vector-borne diseases, and climate-related health shocks.
Fragmented funding to predictable financing
This begins with shifting from scheme-by-scheme allocations to multi-year, predictable financing that states and providers can plan around. It also requires pooling and aligning funds across the Center and states, and across vertical programs, to reduce duplication and close last-mile gaps. Predictable financing should be tied to measurable outcomes—coverage, quality, and continuity of care—rather than only to inputs and infrastructure. Strengthening primary care and public health functions through stable operating budgets will be as important as capital expenditure. Finally, timely fund flows and streamlined procurement will determine whether digital systems, diagnostics, and frontline services scale reliably.
Conclusions
India’s health achievements to date are substantial. Maternal mortality has declined sharply since 1990, and out-of-pocket expenditure as a share of total health spending has fallen steadily over the past decade. Yet, reaching the global top tier of health systems will require a strategic pivot.
Budget 2026 must move beyond incremental change and invest in a whole-of-society approach that places digital public infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and preventive care at the centre of health policy. The opportunity now is to transition decisively from an illness-centric system to a wellness-led, digitally empowered healthcare future.
This was first published in “ET edge insights” on 30th January 2026.
This white paper explores data sharing as a key pillar of digital public infrastructure, which operationalizes interoperability in practice. It presents a broad conceptualization of data sharing systems that combines technology solutions, policies, and governance. These systems highlight trust and data protection by design as core features. This paper explores how these systems can improve public service delivery based on case studies from Brazil, Cambodia, Mauritius, and Uganda. Further, the paper outlines diverse models, use cases, challenges, and enabling factors. It also discusses emerging efforts to build open data ecosystems to drive AI innovation in public service delivery. This paper concludes with recommendations for governments and ecosystem stakeholders to scale data sharing systems for more accessible and efficient public services in LMICs.
Gumla’s story highlights the importance of strengthening last-mile delivery of financial services for particularly vulnerable tribal groups (PVTG) through closer alignment with on-ground realities.
Over the past decade, national and state governments have intensified efforts to reach these people. The Pradhan Mantri Janjati Adivasi Nyaya Maha Abhiyan (PM-JANMAN) mission began in 2023 with an allocation in excess of INR 240 billion (approximately USD 3 billion).
Delivery models of welfare, financial inclusion, and social protection services often work well when people have access to regular services and can navigate written or digital processes. They run smoothly when people have standard documentation, predictable income, and stable mobility patterns. While these conditions hold in some contexts, they do not align with settings shaped by remote geographies, seasonal livelihoods, linguistic diversity, and strong community-based social structures.
MSC drew from field engagement and evidence to examine last-mile delivery of public and financial services for PVTG communities using the PACE lens, focusing on:
Delivery models encounter multiple constraints: distance, mobility, and predictability
As connectivity expands, these regions hold potential for greater participation in financial systems. Digital connectivity is gradually expanding access options. Under the 4G saturation initiative, the government covered 900 PVTG villages so far, and 500 mobile towers were installed in six months. Complementing this, BharatNet has connected more than 210,000 gram panchayats to expand digital pathways for welfare and financial services. This expansion, however, does not automatically translate into last-mile usage. In practice, whether digital services are used often depends on how transactions are perceived and socially validated at the community level. In a small market settlement of Tripura, merchants continue to prefer cash, since “with cash, the work feels complete,” as one shopkeeper noted. Seeing neighbors receive instant confirmations has helped digital tools feel increasingly dependable. Field interactions suggest that effective access depends less on services being available and more on transactions being socially verifiable- where people can see, hear, or confirm through trusted networks that payments have gone through.
When communication systems rely on text, but engagement is built on trust
Another area where service delivery becomes nuanced for PVTGs relates to how people receive and interpret information. Many public systems rely on written instructions, standard templates, and forms. In contrast, PVTG communities often prefer oral communication and rely on trusted interpersonal networks and familiar social settings.
MSC’s field experience from Muniguda block in Odisha illustrates how customized communication pathways shape engagement. In several PVTG habitations, information about banking and welfare services circulates primarily through verbal exchanges and trusted local contacts rather than written notices or formal announcements. Participation in service camps is higher when information is conveyed by familiar individuals, and lower when communication relies on impersonal or text-heavy formats.
Another hurdle is the local dialects that most households primarily speak. Literacy among PVTGs is estimated to be between 10% and 44%, whereas it is 74% nationwide. As a result, information may be technically available but not meaningfully accessible.
Similar observations can be seen in community-led group spaces. In Chhattisgarh, women who attend financial literacy sessions prefer seating arrangements that align with local customs. This preference for familiar settings is echoed in PVTG habitations in Jharkhand, where community meetings are most effective in open spaces rather than offices. “Here, we feel more comfortable asking questions,” a member observed. When conversations with community members move at a pace shaped by group discussion and contextually relevant set-ups, participation deepens and understanding follows naturally.
Correspondingly, women’s participation in self-help groups in several PVTG geographies remains below 15% compared to 21% nationally. These numbers highlight lower participation in formal group-based arrangements among PVTG women, pointing to the need for further analysis of how platform design and social context shape engagement.
Open-space community meetings in Dumri block, Jharkhand, support participation in PVTG habitations
Several states are responding to these contextual factors. In Gumla district, Jharkhand, a helpline operated by a PVTG community member combines trust with practical guidance and provides Aadhaar and documentation support in the local dialect. Models, such as BC Sakhis, locally tailored NRLM financial literacy campaigns, pictorial Information, Education, Communication (IEC) materials, and community radio, similarly contribute to improved comprehension and reduced hesitation. Alongside such measures, the district also adopted an Awareness–Enrolment–Troubleshooting (AET) approach, where information dissemination is complemented by enrolment assistance and support to resolve documentation or account-related issues that emerge during access. Rather than treating engagement as a one-time interaction, this approach recognises the need for continued handholding across stages in contexts shaped by literacy, language, and mobility constraints.
Taken together, these examples illustrate how enrolment processes are being adapted on the ground through local language support and familiar social settings in select states.
Livelihood rhythms and financial engagement
Livelihood and income further shape how households engage with financial and welfare systems. For many PVTG households, incomes are seasonal, informal, and linked closely to natural cycles. They earn from forest produce, marginal farming, or daily wage labor. Therefore, even small disruptions, such as illness or delayed payments, can hurt their financial stability.
These realities shape how households interact with formal financial systems. Products designed around regular incomes and fixed repayment schedules may not always align with seasonal cash flows. As a result, households may engage cautiously or intermittently, even when access is available.
Livelihood initiatives linked to shared production offer insights into between livelihood cycles and financial engagement mechanisms can support more stable engagement. In a premium indigenous rice variety, which linked them to better markets and more predictable incomes.
Similarly, in areas where women’s SHG federations are structured around seasonal earning patterns, monthly household incomes have increased by up to 22%. These experiences show how livelihood programs grounded in local economic rhythms can help households strengthen resilience and sustain engagement with formal systems.
Jeeraphool cultivation by PVTG farmers in Mahuadanr block, Jharkhand, reflects how collective livelihood platforms support more predictable incomes
Implications for policy and program design in PVTG contexts
In policy and program design, services for PVTG communities are more effective when delivery arrangements reflect local work patterns, mobility, and access constraints. Services are easier to access when they are available at right times and places, and when information is shared through trusted local channels and familiar languages. Participation is also shaped by seasonal livelihoods and limited financial buffers, which make it difficult for households to engage if services require repeated visits or loss of income. Engagement tends to be more sustained when local intermediaries support communities in navigating public systems and resolving issues over time. Across several PVTG areas, district administrations are beginning to adapt delivery approaches by combining improved access with clearer communication and practical process support, as reflected in initiatives such as PM-JANMAN and the Aspirational Districts and Blocks Programme. As a development partner under these programmes, MSC supports districts in identifying locally grounded models that help move from outreach to more consistent and meaningful participation.
In many tribal communities, access to financial and welfare services requires multiple visits across difficult terrain, limited connectivity, language barriers, and repeated documentation. Through its on-ground interventions, MSC (MicroSave Consulting) reveals that legacy delivery models often fail because they expect communities to adapt to rigid systems. MSC worked closely with communities and district administrations to redesign service delivery. This approach seeks to understand community needs, resolve issues in one place, align outreach with daily routines, and build trust through local networks. This flipbook captures how adaptive delivery turns access into impact.
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