Family ID Systems Slash Welfare Leakages by Up to 25%, Says Primus Report
Mumbai: Primus Partners, one of India’s leading consultancies, has released a thought leadership report titled ‘Families at the Centrepiece of Viksit Bharat’, advocating for a shift toward family-based welfare delivery systems. The report emphasizes the need for governments to curate a family-based repository of citizens to enhance the efficiency and equity of welfare distribution.
The report highlights successful implementations in states like Haryana and Karnataka, where family ID repositories have significantly reduced leakages and improved application processing times. Inspired by these outcomes, other states including Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar, and Tamil Nadu are now exploring or implementing similar systems.
According to the report, the Central Government allocated nearly ₹13.7 lakh crores in 2023–24 for welfare and subsidy schemes, with individual states also running their own programs. By shifting the focus from individual to family-based parameters, welfare delivery can become more accurate and responsive to citizens’ actual needs. The model, already proven effective in countries like Brazil, is gaining traction across India.
Primus Partners recommends that governments avoid rigid definitions of “family” due to India’s diverse demographic landscape. Instead, states should adopt flexible guidelines based on kinship, economic dependence, and colocation to determine family units.
Key recommendations from the report include the publication of generic guidelines by the Central Government to help states define family parameters. In light of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, the report also calls for a robust consent management framework to ensure that citizen data is processed securely and transparently. Consent should be specific and limited to the data necessary for scheme eligibility, requiring states to map all welfare schemes against relevant citizen parameters.
The report further suggests that “Family-based repository for social protection and welfare delivery” be added to the Concurrent List in the Seventh Schedule of the Indian Constitution. This would empower states to develop and maintain such repositories independently while ensuring consistency across the country.
Given the technological complexity and cost of implementing these systems—especially with the use of AI and natural language processing—the report recommends that the Central Government establish a common data factory. This centralized infrastructure would reduce costs, minimize data leakage risks, and enable anonymized data analysis for national welfare planning.
Commenting on the initiative, Sameer Jain, Managing Director and Board Member at Primus Partners, said, “A Family ID is a forward-looking concept that can redefine how welfare is delivered by aligning support with the real needs of families. It enables the government to design more targeted, equitable, and efficient interventions, helping build a stronger, more inclusive society as we work towards the vision of Viksit Bharat.”
As India transitions toward a more mature, tech-driven welfare ecosystem, the report concludes that family-based targeting will make welfare delivery more transparent, equitable, and capable of achieving saturation across schemes.
