Digital Public Infrastructure
Architecture, interoperability and adoption for population-scale systems, plus the ownership that outlasts the build partner.
Strategy we’d be willing to deliver ourselves.
We’ll tell you what we’d do if it were our money and our team. Value per rupee becomes a design input, not an evaluation finding.
₹800+ crSocial investment shaped by our strategic advice
21Programs designed or redesigned
8Government, corporate and nonprofit partners
10yrsOf combined field and strategy practice
Good programs get expensive for reasons visible at the strategy stage.
Cost-effectiveness is usually asked after the money is committed, when the answer can no longer change anything. Four mechanisms cause it.
01 / 04The strategy is fixed before the unit economics are known
Programs are designed, then costed. It should run the other way: once you know what one outcome costs in one district, most design choices resolve themselves.
02 / 04Ambition is set by budget, not cost per outcome
Targets come from funding divided by a per-beneficiary cost nobody tested in that geography. The program then spends three years defending arithmetic.
03 / 04The theory of change is a diagram, not a decision tool
If this assumption is wrong, what do we stop doing? A theory of change that cannot answer that is documentation, not strategy.
04 / 04The strategy assumes a delivery capability nobody checked
Supervision ratios, staff quality and data timeliness the ground cannot supply. The strategy is sound; the arithmetic underneath is fiction. So we stress-test every design against real field conditions.
None of these need new evidence. They need the questions asked in a different order.
See the orderCost-to-Outcome Design
Six stages, with the cost question asked at stage three rather than at the end.
Stages 03 and 05 are where most strategy work stops short.
- 01
Frame
What outcome, for whom, at what cost threshold. A program without a threshold cannot make trade-offs later, and this stage usually surfaces the disagreement the leadership team has been avoiding.
- 02
Evidence
What is already known to work, what it costs, and where the evidence is thinner than the sector’s confidence in it. We separate proven, promising and assumed.
- 03
Where most stop shortModel
The unit economics, modelled before the strategy is fixed. Cost per outcome under different design choices, tested against real delivery costs rather than assumed ones.
- 04
Design
The program built to meet the cost-to-outcome target: intervention logic, coverage, sequencing, partners, and a theory of change you can actually decide with.
- 05
Where most stop shortStress-test
The strategy run against terrain, seasonality, local capacity and supervision reality. We run field operations ourselves, so the numbers we test against are ours, not borrowed.
- 06
Institutionalise
Decision logs and handover built so the strategy survives a transfer, an election or a leadership change. A strategy that lives in one champion’s head lasts about eighteen months.
Eleven engagements. Find the sentence that sounds like you.
Each line is what a partner actually says on a first call.
We’re designing something new and want the cost per outcome right before the budget locks.
Results have plateaued and we can’t tell whether the problem is the design or the delivery.
It worked in three districts. Should we take it to thirty, and what breaks if we do?
We collect an enormous amount of data and it changes very few decisions.
Getting the cost per outcome right before the budget locks.
We have a mandate, a budget, and a board that wants defensible outcomes per rupee.
We know we need a climate position. We don’t yet know what ours should be.
Twelve programs, one budget. Which ones grow, which hold, which stop?
We can’t do this alone, and we’re not sure who should be doing what.
Deciding what grows, what holds and what stops.
Six vendors, four departments, one deadline, and no single view of the truth.
Our leadership team doesn’t agree on what we’re trying to do, and it’s showing up downstream.
Our structure was built for the organisation we were five years ago.
Structures that carry the strategy after we leave.
Most social sector technology is built for reporting upward, not for running the program.
A separate practice: the buyers, budgets and failure modes are different. Every recommendation is tested against what a field team can run on a five-year-old handset.
Enterprise Digital Transformation
Process redesign, system selection and migration. Vendor-neutral: sometimes the stack is fine and the real problem is process.
AI & Technology Strategy
Where AI genuinely helps a program, what it costs at your volume, and the governance it needs before it touches a beneficiary decision.
We do not hand over a deck and wish you luck.
We run field operations across 60 districts. So we model change with numbers we collected, and we won’t recommend an operating model we wouldn’t run ourselves.
How we keep that honest
- Fixed-fee, scoped independently of any delivery work.
- Our fee does not change if you hire us to implement.
- Where another implementer fits better, we name them.
- Need us out of the tender to keep procurement clean? We’ll say so in writing.
The people who design strategy are the people who do the work.
Strategy is bought on judgment, and judgment belongs to specific people.
Prashant Mehra
Cofounder & CEO
Satyam Gambhir
Co-founder & CEO. Leads strategy for state and philanthropic programmes.
Aashish Aadarsh
Co-founder. Leads technology and the platform bets behind each programme.
Dibyajit Sahu
Director, Operations. Runs field delivery across eighteen states.
Ananya Sreenath
Lead, Design & Research. Takes every engagement to the ground first.
Jamal Ahmed
Principal, Strategy. Works on cost per outcome and programme design.
Palak Jain
Manager, Partnerships. Builds the ecosystem around each programme.
Across government systems, foundations and some of India’s largest nonprofits.
Six focus areas. Five kinds of partner.
Governments, corporations, nonprofits, foundations and CSR intermediaries.
4Quality educationLearning programs costed per child who learns, not per child enrolled.
3Good health and well-beingCare pathways designed around the frontline worker who delivers them.
2Zero hungerFarmer programs built on season, soil and the real cost of reaching a village.
8Decent workIncome programs measured by earnings that last past the grant.
16Strong institutionsPublic systems citizens can reach, use and hold to account.
17Partnerships for the goalsCoalitions where every partner knows what they own.
Planning a programme?
“The most expensive decisions in a programme are made before anyone costs them. Bring us the plan early, and we will help you get the cost per outcome right before the budget locks.”
SG
Talk to usSatyam GambhirCo-founder, commons.inc
Related insights & case studies.
Before the budget is locked.
The decisions that decide value per rupee are made early and are expensive to reverse. Forty-five minutes with one of the people above, and our read on your problem either way.