Indus Action is helping millions of Indians claim the welfare benefits they're owed
The Indian government allocates an estimated US$150bn annually for social protections, but much of it goes unclaimed. 2026 Skoll Award winner Indus Action ensures that money reaches those who need it most.
Before Meenu Devi, a mother in the Indian capital of Delhi, learned of Indus Action, she had no idea her children might be able to access a free private-school education. But with the help of Indus Action, a social enterprise that connects Indians with the benefits they are entitled to, she found out that her family could apply under the Right to Education Act.
The law, enacted in 2010, requires private schools to allocate 25% of places to students aged six to 14 from economically and socially disadvantaged backgrounds. When Indus Action was founded in 2013, only 4% of eligible families were aware of this.
“Unfortunately, it’s still a lottery, and though she applied, her children didn’t get through,” says Tarun Cherukuri, Indus Action’s CEO and founder. But Ms Devi wanted to spread the word to other women in her neighbourhood, so she enrolled as an Indus Action community organiser. “Over the last decade, she’s helped more than 10,000 other local members access education scholarships,” says Mr Cherukuri.
Ms Devi’s case illustrates a larger systemic problem. Indus Action estimates that only 10-20% of eligible households receive all the welfare benefits they are entitled to, leaving vast sums unclaimed each year. In a country where around 800m people—roughly 57% of Indians—depend on food rations and remain socio-economically vulnerable, access to these entitlements is crucial.
Indus Action is closing the gap with a three-pronged approach: simplifying how citizens claim benefits, training governments to deliver them independently, and using research to drive long-term reform. Its team maps the processes citizens navigate to access welfare entitlements, from schooling to employment benefits, child support and pensions, to see where people are falling through the cracks and to identify opportunities for digitisation and automation.
“Hopefully in ten years time, we’ll be redundant, or our work will be limited to the most risky scenarios.”
Tarun Cherukuri
Seasonal construction workers who move between sites, for example, are often excluded from social welfare programmes that require proof of address. As a result, an estimated 640bn rupees (US$6.9bn) in funds available through the Building and Other Construction Workers Act — funded by a 1% levy on construction costs, and covering everything from maternity benefits to pensions — goes unused each year.
“We’re trying to help the state get these benefits to citizens in the least number of steps, and fully utilise existing social protection budgets to enable citizens to chart their own paths out of poverty,” says Mr Cherukuri. A free school place, for example, used to necessitate a 15-step process requiring parents to shuttle forms between schools and government offices. Indus Action’s Right to Education platform, which allows parents to apply online and auto-enrols children for future scholarships, reduces the process to no more than five steps.
For funders, the model is compelling: Indus Action says that every US$1 invested in its work enables US$30 in existing government benefits to reach citizens. A 2020 study by the International Trade Union Confederation found that, in India, investing 1% of GDP in social protection has a multiplier effect of 1.3.
Although Indus Action’s technology platform greatly simplifies the benefits application process, there are limits to what tech alone can achieve. Digital proficiency varies between Indian states, and internet access can be intermittent in some regions. In the heavily forested state of Chhattisgarh, Indus Action organises registration camps in the most hard-to-reach hamlets, where citizens can fill out forms in person.
Over the past decade, Indus Action has helped 3m citizens to access US$213m in benefits. By 2027, it targets an increase in this figure to 10m. To deliver this, it is developing a “Universal Entitlements Interface”— a single platform through which citizens can access more than 5,000 benefit programmes. Under this initiative, state governments, using data they already hold, identify who is eligible for which benefits and inform them of their entitlements. The goal is to cut the administrative costs of accessing benefits by up to 70%, by creating systems that states manage themselves. “We make sure governments aren’t depending on our project management. That exit clause is important, and it’s proof that we’ve built retainable, sustainable institutional capacity,” says Mr Cherukuri. “Hopefully in ten years time, we’ll be redundant, or our work will be limited to the most risky scenarios.”
For Mr Cherukuri, the motivation is personal. He grew up in rural Andhra Pradesh, at a time where around 50% of children were out of school. He studied public policy at Harvard University, thanks to scholarships. “Seven institutions put money in for me to complete my education,” says Mr Cherukuri. “A lot of us at Indus Action have similar stories, and we wouldn’t be here without the public money that’s been invested in us. We see it as our mission to pay it forward.”