A community managed social security system that gives complete protection without taxes, premiums or savings. The first expenditure based model in the world.
A medical emergency should not be enough to destroy a family. For most of India's poor, it still is. CESS is a social security system that protects against the loss of life, health and livelihood, drawn entirely from spending people already do.
India has leapt toward developed status, but the majority still live without a safety net. State benefits reach mainly the organised sector, while 93 percent of the workforce, contributing 63 percent of GDP, works informally. Existing insurance is income linked and savings based, designed for those with a surplus and sold as a tax benefit, which makes it irrelevant for people who cannot make two ends meet.
Years of research led OASiS to a different insight: a model for the poor can work only if it does not squeeze their meagre resources, and if it leverages the advantage of a large population. So CESS funds security not through taxes, savings or spending cuts, but as a by product of a community's everyday, non discretionary expenditure.
The system builds complementary business activities for Self Employed Groups, formed out of Self Help Groups. Each group both produces and consumes within one integrated local business model, acting as sellers and buyers at once. As the community consumes, it earns free insurance cover against loss of life, ability, health, livelihood and old age. Every family holds a Personal Account for Social Security, a bank account that accumulates a security fund from their own consumption. The community even chooses its own insurance instruments and insurer. It is, in spirit, a Gram Swaraj model: of the people, by the people, for the people.
After a successful pilot in Betul, Madhya Pradesh, the model was replicated by Jai-Jui Vichar Manch in Solapur, Maharashtra. Two more replications are under way, by Drishtee in Bihar and by Proto Village in Andhra Pradesh. NGOs, community organisations, microfinance institutions and CSR teams are welcome to replicate it. Connected together across regions, such systems could form the social security net the country has long lacked.
The model received the Changemakers Innovation Award in 2006. It has been documented by Ashoka Changemakers and presented at an international research conference in Chennai in 2014, and covered by All India Radio.
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