DBT in Fertilizer (DBT-F) is a modified subsidy payment system that remits subsidies to fertilizer companies only after retailers sell fertilizer to farmers through Aadhaar-based authentication. The NITI Aayog and the Department of Fertilizers (DoF) in India engaged MSC to study the program and provide actionable solutions to improve its implementation. MSC provided technical support to conceptualize and implement a set of DBT pre-pilots in two districts of Andhra Pradesh followed by a pilot in 14 districts. MSC also provided implementation and design support at each stage through concurrent evaluations.
MSC’s work comprised a mixed-methods study design, which included qualitative and quantitative research with 12,000 retailers and farmers. MSC recommended measures, such as developing a device-agnostic application, deploying a centralized call center, and altering the POS application to generate transaction receipts in local languages. MSC submitted an approach note to the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers to transition directly from in-kind subsidy to cash transfer subsidy to farmers’ accounts.
MSC’s intervention led to the nationwide implementation of DBT-F in a record time of two years. This led to efficiency, administrative gains, and financial savings.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation commissioned the project.
The Government of India launched AgriStack to establish a Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) for agriculture that improves service delivery and farmer support systems across the country. AgriStack aims to unify and digitize farmer-centric data, enabling access to services such as crop advisory, credit, insurance, and market linkages. The platform is designed to be federated and open, allowing integration between central and state governments, as well as private sector actors.
MSC supported the conceptualization, design, and piloting of AgriStack. We focused on developing three foundational digital registries: the farmer registry, a georeferenced land parcel registry, and a crop sown registry. Through more than 10 pilots across diverse states, we tested and refined standard operating procedures (SOPs) that could be scaled nationally. MSC also helped develop user-facing digital applications and backend systems to support registry creation and maintenance. MSC created training manuals for local implementation teams and supported the development of uniform data structures and nomenclature to enable interoperability across platforms. This groundwork facilitates the creation of the Unified Farmers Services Interface (UFSI), a central data exchange layer for agriculture-related services.
AgriStack lays the foundation for a unified digital ecosystem for agriculture in India. MSC’s work contributed to a scalable and interoperable digital framework that supports real-time data-driven decision-making, increases farmer access to services, and improves efficiency across agricultural value chains. The project is currently in the rollout phase across India, signaling a transformative step in agricultural governance and service delivery.
The Gates Foundation commissioned the project.
The Government of India enacted the National Food Security Act (NFSA) in 2013 to ensure people could access adequate quantities of quality food at affordable prices. Since 2014, MSC has collaborated with the Department of Food and Public Distribution (DFPD) on research projects to examine the Public Distribution System’s (PDS) nutritional effectiveness, the effect of cash transfers in union areas, the PDS supply chain, and the expansion of the Integrated Management of Public Distribution System (IMPDS)—One Nation One Ration Card.
MSC formulated a technical support unit (TSU) at DFPD in 2020 to continue providing technical support to the department’s initiatives. MSC has been working with the DFPD to implement, scale up, and stabilize the national-level portability of fair price shops. MSC also created a robust system to analyze data and a near real-time monitoring system to help strengthen the system.
MSC continues to create evidence to scale up initiatives, use PDS’s potential to improve nutritional outcomes and implement ongoing direct benefit transfer (cash) pilots in union territories alongside choice-based pilots in states.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation commissioned the project.
MSC has been conducting women’s business diaries-based action research in Bangladesh to reduce financial barriers to access for women entrepreneurs. MSC will track all financial and nonfinancial transactions of about 500 women entrepreneurs for this project. This research is set against the backdrop of the minimal evidence available on how women-owned businesses are run and the unclear impact of social norms that restrict women’s agency. Research on microenterprises has only recently revealed hypotheses, such as men making business decisions for women-owned micro and small enterprises (WMSEs) and women’s preference for different types of businesses than men.
Through this research, MSC will take a comprehensive view of the lives of female business owners. This includes their financial, business management, digital, and personal lives. MSC will then collaborate with financial institutions to use insights from the action research to develop gender-centric financial products and help WMSEs in Bangladesh.
The CRAg working group seeks to address three broad inter-related aspects of agri-food systems:
- Integration and coordination in value chains: This is a central problem in developing economies, characterized by numerous smallholder farmers and businesses with poor communication, weak physical infrastructure, and ineffective formal institutions.
- Diffusion of innovation across value chain participants: Even where innovations are ostensibly well-engineered for the context, frameworks of understanding, values, and risk perceptions play a significant role in shaping the diffusion of innovation and hence the adoption of productivity and resilience-enhancing technologies.
- Financing innovation end-to-end: The transformation of agri-food systems generally requires upfront investment and dealing with the problem of the inherent risks posed by change. Smallholders and small-scale firms in agri-food systems are frequently especially constrained in their ability to raise the finance to enable a shift from business-as-usual.
MSC helped the Government of India design and develop AgriStack as a digital public infrastructure (DPI) with a collection of registries, datasets, APIs, and information technology systems enabled by common policies, standards, and guidelines. It can open up data in agriculture that can enable governments and the private sector to develop small-scale producer-centric services and solutions. MSC is collaborating with India’s Government of Bihar on the Integrated Digital Farmer Services (DFS) platform, a comprehensive digital agriculture solution to offer holistic services and support to small-scale producers. These programs intend to bridge information gaps, reduce risks, empower small-scale producers with skills, knowledge, and information, and enhance their incomes and resilience.