Why The Problem Isn’t The Policy — It’s The Process

India spends roughly $150 billion annually on social protection—yet most benefits never reach the people they are designed to support. That staggering inefficiency isn’t a failure of policy intent; it’s a failure of process. Tarun Cherukuri founded Indus Action to bridge the chasm between well-meaning policies and actual delivery on the ground. The problem, he argues, isn’t what the government wants to do—it’s how it tries to do it. For decades, India has layered entitlement after entitlement—food subsidies, cash transfers, job guarantees, pension schemes—only to see leaky databases, bureaucratic bottlenecks, and exclusion errors swallow a huge share of the intended impact. Indus Action enters this landscape as a fixer, not a reinventor. The organization works inside government systems to improve data quality, streamline verification, and close the last-mile gap. Instead of designing new policies, it focuses on making existing ones work. Cherukuri’s insight: you can have the best policy on paper, but if the process to deliver it is broken, the policy is effectively dead. Indus Action’s approach is hyper-local and data-intensive. It deploys community workers to help families navigate enrollment, cross-checks welfare rolls against official databases, and flags mismatches that keep eligible people out. The results are concrete: in several states, Indus Action has helped increase the share of entitled beneficiaries actually receiving benefits by double-digit percentages. The broader lesson applies well beyond India. Social protection systems worldwide suffer from process failures—not just policy gaps. The rise of digital governance, biometric IDs, and real-time monitoring offers new tools, but tools alone don’t fix process design. What matters is the human and organizational choreography that turns a law into a meal or a cash deposit. Cherukuri’s work with Indus Action points toward a new model: social entrepreneurs who specialize in implementation science, not advocacy. The next frontier is scaling these process fixes across all of India’s 36 states and union territories—and then exporting the playbook to other countries wrestling with similar inefficiencies. If the global community wants to make good on the Sustainable Development Goals, it will need to pay as much attention to how benefits are delivered as to what benefits are promised.