What 500 households in India's urban slums taught us about digital money
India built the world's most ambitious digital-payments rails and connected them to welfare through the JAM trinity. In the slums where I did my fieldwork, the rails were real. Whether they changed lives depended on something the policy design barely mentioned.
Over several years of doctoral and postdoctoral research, I sat in more than five hundred households across urban slum communities in Punjab and Chandigarh, asking a deceptively simple question: now that the payment reaches your phone or your Aadhaar-linked account, what actually changes? The policy story India tells about itself — the JAM trinity of Jan Dhan bank accounts, Aadhaar identity and mobile connectivity delivering welfare directly to the poor — is a genuine achievement, and I do not want to diminish it. But the fieldwork kept surfacing a gap between access and outcome that the headline numbers hide, and understanding that gap is the whole game.
Access arrived. Capability did not automatically follow.
The central finding across this body of work, published across Technological Forecasting & Social Change, Cities, the International Journal of Social Economics and Global Business Review, is that a digital payment landing in an account is not the same as a household gaining financial capability. A woman can have a Jan Dhan account, a working phone and a welfare transfer arriving on time, and still be unable to convert any of that into a better livelihood — because she cannot read the transaction, does not trust the interface, depends on a shopkeeper or agent who takes a cut, or has no productive use for credit even when it becomes available. Economists have a word for this: conversion. Access is an input. Capability is what you can actually do with it. The distance between the two is where most inclusion policy quietly fails.
This is not an argument against digital public infrastructure. It is an argument for taking the last mile — the human, cognitive, trust-laden last mile — as seriously as we took the rails. When we modelled e-payment adoption and the JAM trinity's effect on poverty alleviation, awareness and usability mattered as much as availability. When we looked at credit, we found that the pattern of use, not merely the presence of credit, determined whether it lifted a household or trapped it. Unproductive credit consumption and beneficiary malpractice were not moral failings so much as predictable responses to a system that delivered money without delivering the ability to use it well.
Why this matters beyond one set of slums
India is now exporting its digital public infrastructure model, and other countries in the Global South are adopting versions of it. The lesson from the ground is portable: if you measure success by accounts opened and rupees transferred, you will declare victory long before the poor experience one. The honest metrics are downstream — did household resilience improve, did livelihoods diversify, did the transfer convert into something that lasts after it is spent. Those are harder to measure, which is precisely why they get skipped, and precisely why they are worth the effort.
My more recent work extends this from primary fieldwork into large secondary datasets — Global Findex, official state-level data, cross-country panels — asking the same conversion question at national scale: when does digital financial inclusion actually associate with household resilience, and when is it just access dressed up as outcome? The through-line from a single slum household to a ninety-seven-economy panel is the same stubborn distinction between having and being able.
Read the underlying research
If you want the evidence rather than the summary, the peer-reviewed articles behind this piece are all linked with DOIs on our Publications page. Three good entry points are the mixed-methods study of fintech and capability expansion in urban slums in Technological Forecasting & Social Change, the analysis of e-payment systems and the JAM trinity in Global Business Review, and the study of credit-utilisation patterns and poverty alleviation drawn from the same fieldwork. Each was written to survive review, and each says plainly what it does and does not show.
Designing an evaluation that measures conversion rather than just coverage — for a welfare programme, a CSR initiative or a development study? Evaluation and evidence is part of what we do, and it is grounded in exactly this research.