BEYOND GDP: Should India Start Measuring Social Capital?

 

THE MEASUREMENT REVOLUTION

India has become exceptionally good at measuring economic activity. It knows the size of its economy, the rate at which it is growing, how much governments collect in taxes, how much households consume, how much companies invest and how much the country exports. Every quarter, the GDP number becomes a national event. Markets react to it. Governments defend it. Economists analyse it. Newspapers turn it into headlines. Yet there is a peculiar asymmetry in the way a country measures progress. India can tell us with considerable precision how much economic activity took place, but it is much harder to answer a different question: how much capacity does Indian society have to trust, cooperate, participate and withstand shocks?

That is not an abstract philosophical question. It can determine whether economic resources actually produce the results policymakers expect. A health programme can have funding, doctors and infrastructure and still struggle if people do not trust the institutions delivering it. A disaster-response system can possess money and equipment but lose valuable time if local networks are too weak to identify vulnerable households or coordinate assistance. A government scheme can be perfectly designed on paper and underperform in practice because citizens do not believe that institutions will deliver what they promise. The problem is not that GDP is measuring the wrong thing. GDP is doing the job it was designed to do. The problem is that a country's economic output is not the same thing as its entire stock of social and institutional capacity.

This distinction has become increasingly important internationally. The OECD's work on measuring social capital recognises that the concept includes several dimensions that conventional economic accounts do not capture neatly, including personal relationships, social-network support, civic engagement, trust and cooperative norms. The organisation has also acknowledged a fundamental measurement problem: there is no single universally accepted way to define or measure social capital, making comparisons across countries and over time more difficult. That difficulty is not an argument for abandoning the concept. It is an argument for becoming more precise about what we mean when we say that a society is cohesive, trusting or capable of collective action.

The instinct to measure everything that matters is not new. Modern states already count education, health, employment, poverty, inequality, household consumption and demographic change because policymakers eventually discovered that financial output alone could not tell them enough about how a country was functioning. The evolution of economic measurement itself reflects this lesson. What began as an effort to understand production gradually expanded into national income accounting, labour statistics, poverty measures and broader indicators of human development. The question facing India now is whether the next stage should include a more systematic measurement of the social relationships that help institutions and communities function.

There is an important warning here. Measuring social capital does not mean putting a price on friendship. Nor does it mean creating a government score for how “good” a community is. Human relationships are too complex to be reduced to one number. The objective would be much more practical: to identify measurable features of social life that have consequences for public policy and economic resilience. How many people participate in community activities? How much time do they contribute to unpaid work or volunteering? Do people have someone they can rely on during a crisis? Do citizens trust institutions? Do communities cooperate across social boundaries? Are relationships between citizens and institutions strengthening or deteriorating?

India has already begun collecting some of the information needed to ask these questions. The 2024 Time Use Survey conducted by the National Statistics Office is particularly revealing because it measures not only paid employment but unpaid domestic services, caregiving, volunteer and other unpaid work, socialising, community participation and religious practice. The survey found that, among people aged six and above, 1.0% participated in unpaid volunteer, trainee and other unpaid work on the reference day, while 90.3% participated in socialising, communication, community participation and religious practice. These categories are not measures of social capital themselves, and they should not be presented as such. But they demonstrate that India already possesses statistical instruments capable of observing parts of the social activity that conventional economic indicators leave less visible.

The distinction between these categories is crucial. Spending time at a religious gathering is not automatically evidence of social capital. Participating in a community activity does not necessarily mean a person trusts other members of society. Volunteering does not automatically produce positive social outcomes. But the existence of these measurements gives policymakers something valuable: a starting point. Instead of pretending that social life is impossible to quantify, India can begin asking which existing datasets can be combined with new surveys to understand participation, networks, trust and resilience more systematically.

The 2024 Time Use Survey also exposes another important feature of the measurement problem. Much of the work that sustains households and communities is unpaid. Among people aged six and above, the survey found that 54.1% participated in unpaid domestic services for household members and 25.9% participated in unpaid caregiving services during the reference day. Women carried a substantially larger share of unpaid domestic and caregiving activity than men. These activities should not simply be relabelled as social capital; they are different concepts. But they demonstrate how much productive human activity can remain outside the most visible measures of market production.

This matters because measurement systems shape policy attention. What governments measure regularly becomes easier to compare, budget for and discuss. What remains invisible tends to depend on anecdotes. A minister can point to the number of kilometres of road constructed. A finance ministry can report tax receipts. A central bank can track credit growth. But if a district's most important development asset is a dense network of community organisations capable of mobilising volunteers during a flood, the value of that network may appear nowhere in the official statistics used to assess the district's capacity.

The problem becomes even more striking when we consider prevention. Suppose a trusted community organisation helps resolve a local dispute before it escalates. Suppose volunteers identify vulnerable households before a disaster. Suppose a local network persuades families to use a health service early enough to prevent a more serious problem. In each case, the social value may partly consist of something that does not happen. There is no hospital bill for the illness that never became severe. There is no reconstruction expenditure for the damage that was prevented. There is no emergency deployment for the crisis that never materialised. Conventional accounting is naturally better at recording transactions than avoided losses.

This creates a fundamental challenge for any attempt to measure social capital. A simple count of organisations is inadequate. A count of volunteers is inadequate. A survey of trust is inadequate. Even a sophisticated index can mislead if it compresses fundamentally different relationships into one number. The measurement system must therefore distinguish between inputs, relationships, behaviours and outcomes.

Consider volunteering. India can measure how many people report volunteering and how much time they spend doing unpaid volunteer work. That tells us something important about participation. But it does not tell us whether the volunteering was effective. Ten people spending one hour cleaning a public space and ten people spending one hour organising an emergency response may both generate ten volunteer-hours, but their immediate outputs are very different. Nor does time alone reveal whether the activity strengthened relationships that continue after the event.

The same problem applies to trust. Asking people whether they trust others can reveal something meaningful about social attitudes. But trust is not one-dimensional. A person may trust family members but not strangers. They may trust neighbours but distrust government departments. They may trust local institutions but have little confidence in national institutions. They may trust people from their own community while remaining suspicious of outsiders. A single national trust score would conceal these distinctions.

This is why the next generation of social measurement will need to become more sophisticated rather than simply more ambitious. India does not need a single number called “Social Capital Index: 72.4.” Such a number would create an illusion of precision. What India needs is a dashboard of complementary measures that reveal different dimensions of social capacity.

One measure could track interpersonal trust: whether people believe others can generally be trusted. Another could examine institutional trust: confidence in public institutions and service providers. A third could measure social-network support: whether people have someone they can rely on for practical, emotional or financial assistance. A fourth could track civic participation: involvement in community organisations, associations and collective activities. A fifth could examine volunteering and unpaid contributions. A sixth could look at bridging relationships—whether people cooperate across social, economic, religious, linguistic or geographic boundaries. A seventh could examine resilience: how communities respond when faced with disasters, economic shocks or disruptions.

None of these measures would replace GDP. They would sit beside it.

That distinction is fundamental because the phrase “Beyond GDP” can easily be misunderstood. It does not mean “GDP is useless.” GDP remains indispensable for understanding economic production and activity. A country needs to know how much it produces, earns and invests. Governments cannot design fiscal or monetary policy without national income statistics. Businesses cannot plan without information about economic demand. Investors cannot evaluate markets without understanding growth. The argument is not to demote GDP. It is to stop asking GDP to answer questions it was never designed to answer.

The same principle applies to inflation. A consumer-price index can tell us how prices are changing. It cannot tell us whether citizens trust the institutions responsible for delivering public services. Employment statistics can tell us whether people are working. They cannot fully capture the quality of relationships within the communities in which those workers live. Household income can tell us something about material resources. It cannot tell us whether a family has a reliable network to turn to during a crisis.

The world has already begun experimenting with broader frameworks. The OECD's work on well-being and its broader Beyond GDP agenda treats economic resources as only one component of how societies perform. Its measurement work considers dimensions such as social connections, civic engagement and trust because these can influence both individual well-being and the functioning of institutions. The organisation's continuing work on measuring social capital also reflects a recognition that the challenge is no longer whether social relationships matter, but how statistical systems can observe them without oversimplifying them.

For India, the opportunity is unusually large because the country already possesses an enormous statistical infrastructure. The question is whether existing information can be connected intelligently rather than simply creating another bureaucratic database. The Time Use Survey, household surveys, administrative records, disaster data, public-service outcomes and carefully designed trust surveys could potentially illuminate different parts of the same problem. The objective would not be to turn citizens into data points. It would be to understand the conditions under which communities and institutions are able to cooperate.

There is also an important democratic argument for doing this carefully. If the State begins measuring trust, participation and community relationships, it must avoid turning measurement into surveillance. A social-capital framework should never become a mechanism for identifying politically desirable communities or judging citizens according to their associations. The purpose should be to understand aggregate patterns and improve policy, not to create a behavioural ranking system for individuals or organisations.

Privacy therefore becomes part of the measurement question. So does representation. People who are easiest to reach through surveys are not necessarily representative of people who are socially isolated. Digital data can provide enormous quantities of information but can also systematically exclude people with limited connectivity. Administrative data can be comprehensive in one dimension and completely blind in another. Community organisations can provide rich local knowledge but may themselves reflect the biases of the communities they serve.

This means the measurement revolution cannot simply be a technology project. It is fundamentally a statistical and institutional design problem. India needs to decide what should be measured, why it should be measured, who should collect it, how frequently it should be updated, how privacy should be protected and how policymakers should interpret the results.

The question of frequency is particularly important. GDP is measured regularly because economic conditions can change quickly. Social capital moves differently. Trust can deteriorate rapidly after a major institutional failure, but rebuilding it may take years. Volunteer participation can surge during a disaster and then fall sharply afterward. Community networks may strengthen gradually through repeated interaction. A useful measurement system therefore needs both regular indicators and longer-term assessments.

Geography matters too. India's national averages can conceal enormous local differences. A national trust figure might look stable while trust is falling sharply in one region and rising in another. A national volunteering figure could hide substantial differences between urban and rural areas. A district with strong community organisations may have a very different social-capital profile from a neighbouring district with similar income and infrastructure but weaker networks.

That suggests the possibility of a Social Capital Map of India—not a ranking of which states are morally superior, but a statistical picture of where different forms of social capacity are strong, weak or changing. Such a map could eventually help policymakers identify places where infrastructure investment is being undermined by weak institutional trust, where community networks could strengthen disaster preparedness, or where public programmes might benefit from stronger partnerships with local organisations.

But even this would not be enough.

The ultimate challenge is connecting measurement to outcomes.

If a district reports high trust, what difference does that make? Does it correspond with higher vaccination uptake? Faster disaster recovery? Greater participation in local government? Better use of public services? Lower transaction costs? Stronger economic resilience? Greater willingness to cooperate during crises? Better educational outcomes?

These are the questions that turn social capital from an attractive concept into a testable policy proposition.

The Indian evidence already suggests that such connections can be studied. The rural Uttar Pradesh immunisation research examined social cohesion at community level and found an association with childhood immunisation, while carefully stopping short of claiming that social capital alone caused the outcome. That distinction should become the standard for India's emerging measurement debate: measure relationships, examine outcomes, test associations and investigate causality rather than assuming it.

The same discipline should apply to volunteering. If the 2024 Time Use Survey tells us that people devote time to unpaid volunteer and other unpaid work, the next question is not simply how large that number is. It is where that activity occurs, who participates, what kinds of organisations receive that contribution and what outcomes follow. The official statistics provide the beginning of the investigation, not the end of it.

This could eventually transform the way India thinks about civil society. Instead of asking only how many organisations exist or how much money flows through them, policymakers could begin asking what institutional capacity exists within communities. Which organisations have durable local networks? Where are volunteer systems strongest? Where do citizens trust community institutions but distrust government? Where does government have strong capacity but weak local connections? Where do different organisations collaborate successfully?

That would represent a major shift.

The first two investigations in this series asked where the money goes and whether India can accurately understand the organisations that make up its nonprofit ecosystem. The trust-economy investigation then asked what those organisations may create beyond their financial statements: relationships, networks, cooperation and resilience. The next step is unavoidable.

If something matters enough to influence development, should a country try to measure it?

The answer cannot simply be yes.

The harder question is how.

Because the moment India begins measuring social capital, it will have to confront a problem that economists have struggled with for decades: some of the most important things in society are not traded in markets, do not carry prices and cannot be reduced to a single number without losing part of what makes them valuable.

And that is where the real Beyond GDP debate begins.

BUILDING A SOCIAL BALANCE SHEET

The most interesting question is no longer whether social capital can be measured. It is whether India could build a measurement system useful enough to inform policy without pretending that human relationships can be reduced to a single score. The international experience suggests that this is possible, but only if measurement is treated as a multidimensional exercise. The OECD's work separates social capital into distinct dimensions such as personal relationships, social-network support, civic engagement and trust, while its more recent work examines how different sources of data can be combined to make social capital more visible. The lesson for India is straightforward: the objective should not be to manufacture one grand number called social capital, but to build a statistical architecture capable of showing its different components.

The first component would be trust. That sounds straightforward until the question becomes: trust in whom? A person may trust family members but not strangers, neighbours but not government departments, local organisations but not national institutions. They may trust a doctor but distrust the hospital administration, or trust a particular community organisation without having confidence in the State. A serious Indian framework would therefore need to distinguish interpersonal trust from institutional trust and, wherever possible, trust within communities from trust across social boundaries. The value of the exercise would lie not in declaring that India is a “high-trust” or “low-trust” country, but in identifying where confidence exists and where it is weakening.

The second component would be participation. India already has evidence that enormous quantities of human activity take place outside conventional employment. The 2024 Time Use Survey recorded socialising, communication, community participation, religious activity, unpaid domestic work, caregiving and volunteer activity. These categories cannot simply be renamed social capital. But they demonstrate that the statistical system can observe parts of social life that are often absent from conventional economic narratives. The next step would be to understand which forms of participation build relationships, which create collective capacity and which remain essentially private activities.

That distinction is essential because activity alone does not equal social value. Two people can each spend ten hours participating in community activities and produce very different outcomes. One may help organise a disaster-response network; another may participate in an activity that creates little continuing cooperation. A national measurement system should therefore move beyond counting participation and begin asking what that participation enables. Does it create new relationships? Does it connect people who otherwise would not interact? Does it create capabilities that remain after the immediate activity ends?

The third component would be social-network support. One of the most revealing questions a national survey could ask is also one of the simplest: if something went seriously wrong tomorrow, who could you turn to? The answer could expose a dimension of resilience that income statistics cannot capture. A household with modest financial resources but strong family, community and institutional connections may have access to forms of assistance unavailable to another household with similar income but weaker networks. Conversely, material prosperity does not automatically eliminate social isolation.

This becomes particularly relevant as India urbanises and its population becomes more mobile. People increasingly move for education and employment, live away from extended families, interact with institutions they do not personally know and maintain relationships through digital platforms. Economic mobility can therefore alter the geography of social capital. The traditional neighbourhood network may weaken while professional, digital or geographically dispersed networks grow. A useful measurement system would need to capture both.

The fourth component would be bridging capacity. This may be the most important dimension for a country as diverse as India because strong internal networks do not necessarily produce cooperation across communities. A women's collective may have extraordinary solidarity among its members but limited relationships outside its own network. A religious institution may mobilise volunteers very effectively within its community but have few connections beyond it. A local organisation may have strong relationships with government but weak connections with other civil-society groups.

The question, therefore, is not simply how connected India is. It is how connected across boundaries India is.

That distinction could fundamentally change the way social capital is measured. A district with thousands of associations might appear socially vibrant, yet those associations could operate almost entirely within separate networks. Another district might have fewer organisations but unusually strong collaboration between community groups, government agencies, businesses, schools and healthcare institutions. The second could possess greater bridging capacity even though its organisational count is lower.

The fifth component would be institutional confidence. This is where social-capital measurement intersects directly with governance. Citizens who believe that institutions are competent, fair and predictable may be more willing to use public services, comply with regulations and cooperate with government programmes. When confidence collapses, governments may have to spend more effort persuading, enforcing and correcting. Trust is therefore not merely an attitude. Under certain conditions, it can affect the cost and effectiveness of governance.

India could track this over time without turning it into a political scoreboard. The important information would be the direction of change. If trust in a particular public service declines sharply, policymakers would have an early signal that something may be wrong. If confidence rises following administrative reform, that would provide another piece of evidence about whether the reform is being experienced positively by citizens. The measurement would not explain the cause by itself, but it could tell policymakers where to investigate.

The sixth component would be volunteer capacity. The Time Use Survey has already established that volunteer and other unpaid activity can be measured. The more difficult task is understanding the organisational infrastructure around that activity. Who receives volunteer labour? How long do people remain involved? What skills do they contribute? Are volunteers trained? Can they be mobilised during emergencies? Do they move between organisations? Does volunteering create durable community relationships?

This suggests that India should eventually distinguish between volunteer hours and volunteer capability. One hour contributed by a trained emergency responder is not equivalent to one hour of unskilled assistance, even though both are valuable. A mature measurement system could therefore examine not merely how much unpaid labour exists, but what capabilities are embedded within it.

The seventh component would be resilience. This is where the measurement of social capital could become directly relevant to national planning. India faces floods, cyclones, heatwaves, pandemics, economic disruptions and other shocks. Physical infrastructure remains indispensable in responding to these events, but so do communication networks, community leadership, local knowledge and the ability of citizens to organise rapidly.

A district-level resilience framework could therefore examine whether communities possess established channels for sharing information, whether local organisations can mobilise volunteers, whether citizens have reliable sources of support and whether public institutions can work effectively with community networks. It would not predict when the next disaster would occur. It would help identify where the social capacity to absorb a shock may be stronger or weaker.

The eighth component would be organisational connectivity. This would take the investigation beyond the question of how many NGOs exist. India could begin examining how organisations interact with one another and with other institutions. Which organisations collaborate repeatedly? Which ones work with hospitals, schools, local governments or disaster agencies? Which communities have several organisations working together? Where are there gaps? Where are there networks that exist on paper but rarely cooperate?

That would transform the NGO database from an inventory into something much more useful: a map of institutional relationships.

Such a map could reveal something a conventional registry cannot. Knowing that a district contains 500 registered organisations tells policymakers relatively little about its actual social capacity. Knowing that 100 of those organisations have functioning partnerships with local government, healthcare institutions, schools and community networks tells a very different story. The second measure begins to reveal the architecture through which resources, information and trust move.

But the more sophisticated the measurement becomes, the greater the danger of misuse. Social capital is partly about relationships, and relationships are personal. A system designed to understand networks could easily become a system capable of mapping individuals. India would therefore need a clear distinction between measuring social patterns and monitoring citizens.

The purpose should be aggregate understanding, not behavioural surveillance. Policymakers may need to know that institutional trust is declining in a particular district. They do not need a database identifying which individual citizens distrust a particular institution. They may need to know that volunteer capacity is weak in an area vulnerable to flooding. They do not need to rank individual citizens according to their civic behaviour.

The same principle should apply to civil-society organisations. Greater transparency about institutional activity can strengthen accountability, but a social-capital framework should not become another mechanism for politically classifying organisations. Its purpose should be to understand capacity, participation, relationships and outcomes while respecting lawful privacy, institutional independence and due process.

There is another danger that policymakers should understand before building such a system: once an indicator becomes a target, people begin optimising for the indicator. If governments reward volunteer hours, organisations may find ways to increase reported hours. If donors reward beneficiary numbers, organisations may prioritise activities that produce impressive counts rather than durable outcomes. If institutions are judged primarily through trust surveys, they may become more interested in improving perceptions than improving performance.

The solution is to distinguish measurement from ranking. A social-capital framework should primarily be diagnostic. It should tell policymakers what is happening, where it is happening and what may require investigation. It should not automatically become a competition in which states, districts, communities or organisations are rewarded simply for producing a better-looking number.

Cultural variation creates another complication. Community life does not look identical across India. Formal membership in associations may be common in one region while informal cooperation is more important elsewhere. Urban networks may operate differently from rural ones. Some communities may organise through religious institutions, others through self-help groups, neighbourhood associations, cooperatives or informal networks. A measurement system designed around one model of civic participation could therefore systematically underestimate forms of social capital that do not resemble it.

The answer is not to abandon measurement. It is to design the measurement around multiple forms of participation and support. The purpose should be to understand how people cooperate, not to impose a preferred model of how they should organise.

India has a major advantage here: it already possesses a substantial statistical infrastructure. Household surveys, time-use data, administrative records, public-service outcomes and disaster information can provide different pieces of the picture. The challenge is to connect them intelligently while maintaining clear methodological boundaries. A trust survey cannot replace administrative data. An NGO registry cannot measure social cohesion. Time-use statistics cannot reveal institutional confidence. Each source tells us something different.

The logical next step could be a National Social Capital Observatory—not necessarily another large government bureaucracy, but a coordinated statistical framework linking existing datasets with carefully designed new measurements. Its purpose would be to bring together information about trust, participation, social support, volunteering, organisational networks and resilience so that policymakers could examine them alongside conventional economic and social indicators.

Such an observatory could eventually support an annual India Social Capital Report. Instead of producing one headline number, the report could show whether interpersonal trust is changing, whether civic participation is rising or falling, whether people have access to reliable social support, whether volunteering is expanding, whether institutional confidence is strengthening and whether communities are becoming more or less connected across social boundaries.

The report could also make geography visible. National averages can hide enormous differences. A country-wide trust indicator could remain stable while trust collapses in one region and rises in another. A national volunteering rate could conceal large differences between urban and rural communities. A district with strong community organisations might possess much greater crisis-response capacity than another district with similar income, infrastructure and population but weaker networks.

That raises the possibility of a Social Capital Map of India. Properly designed, it would not be a league table ranking communities as good or bad. It would be a diagnostic instrument showing where different forms of social capacity are strong, weak or changing. Policymakers could then ask why a particular region has strong community networks but weak institutional trust, why another has excellent government capacity but weak local participation, or why some districts appear unusually resilient during disasters.

But measurement becomes truly useful only when it is connected to outcomes.

If a district reports high levels of trust, what difference does that make? Does it correspond with greater use of health services? Faster disaster recovery? Higher participation in local governance? Better uptake of government programmes? Greater willingness to cooperate during emergencies? Stronger economic resilience?

These are the questions that turn social capital from an attractive idea into something that can be tested.

The Indian evidence already demonstrates that such relationships can be studied. Research from rural Uttar Pradesh found an association between community-level social cohesion and childhood immunisation, while appropriately stopping short of claiming that social capital alone caused the outcome. That distinction should become a standard rule for future measurement: observe the relationship, measure the outcome, investigate the mechanism and test causality rather than assuming it.

The same discipline should apply to volunteering. If India can measure how much time citizens devote to unpaid activities, the next question should be what happens because of that contribution. Does volunteer activity improve disaster response? Does it strengthen access to public services? Does it create lasting networks? Does it increase participation in local institutions? Does it reduce the burden on formal systems? Measurement should progressively move from how much activity exists to what that activity enables.

This could eventually change how policymakers understand India's civil-society ecosystem. An organisation would no longer be visible only as a legal entity receiving money and spending it. Its contribution could increasingly be understood through the relationships it creates, the communities it connects, the volunteers it mobilises and the institutional capacity it helps build.

There is also an important economic reason for taking this seriously. Social capital does not necessarily replace physical, financial or human capital. It can complement them. A hospital requires doctors, equipment and money, but it also needs patients to trust the institution. A disaster-response system requires roads, communications and equipment, but it also needs communities capable of sharing information quickly. A welfare programme requires funding and administrative machinery, but it also depends on citizens believing that participation is worthwhile.

The implication is that national capacity may be interactive rather than simply additive. Physical infrastructure, human capability, financial resources and social relationships can reinforce one another. Weakness in one dimension can reduce the effectiveness of investment in another. A new road can create physical connectivity, but the benefits may be smaller if communities remain disconnected from the institutions and markets the road was intended to reach. A digital platform can connect millions of people, but connectivity does not automatically create trust.

This is where the Beyond GDP debate becomes more serious than an argument about happiness or national mood. It becomes a question of productive capacity. A country that measures economic output knows how much activity took place. A country that also understands its social infrastructure may gain a better sense of how resilient that activity is, how effectively institutions can implement policy and how capable communities are of cooperating when conditions change.

That does not mean social capital should simply be converted into rupees and inserted into GDP. In many cases, that would create false precision. The more useful approach may be to maintain a parallel set of national capability indicators alongside the economic accounts. GDP would continue measuring production. Human-development indicators would measure health, education and living conditions. Environmental accounts would measure natural assets and ecological pressures. Social-capital indicators could measure trust, participation, relationships, civic capacity and resilience.

Together, these would offer something no single indicator can provide: a broader picture of the country's capacity to generate prosperity and sustain it.

The objective, therefore, should be visibility rather than monetisation.

India does not necessarily need to discover the rupee value of trust. It needs to know whether trust is rising or falling. It needs to know whether citizens have networks they can rely on. It needs to know whether communities can mobilise during crises. It needs to know whether institutions are becoming more or less credible. It needs to know whether social networks are creating bridges or reinforcing divisions.

Those are not impossible questions.

They are measurable questions.

And once they become measurable, they can become policy questions.

Imagine an Indian national development report in which GDP growth appears alongside indicators of institutional trust, volunteer participation, social-network support, civic engagement, bridging relationships and community resilience. The headline would no longer tell us only whether India became richer during the year. It could begin telling us whether India became more capable of acting together.

That would represent a significant change in how national progress is understood.

It would also complete the intellectual journey of this investigation. The first article in this series asked where the money flowing through India's civil-society ecosystem actually comes from. The second examined the difficulty of even counting the organisations involved. The third moved beneath the financial data and asked what those organisations may create in the form of relationships, trust, cooperation and resilience. This article has taken the next step: if those things matter, India needs better ways of seeing them.

But measurement is only the beginning.

Once India can see its social infrastructure more clearly, the next question becomes much more practical. Can the country use technology to make that infrastructure more transparent without destroying the trust on which it depends? Can fragmented NGO databases communicate with one another? Can open data help citizens understand funding and impact? Can artificial intelligence identify gaps in service delivery while protecting privacy? Can digital public infrastructure help civil-society organisations become more interoperable without turning them into instruments of surveillance?

The technology to attempt some of these things already exists.

The real question is whether India can assemble it into something worthy of the scale of its civil society.

That is the next investigation:

COULD INDIA BUILD THE WORLD'S MOST TRANSPARENT NGO ECOSYSTEM?

Because once a country learns to see its social infrastructure, the next challenge is to make that infrastructure visible, interoperable and accountable—without destroying the trust it is supposed to measure.

Sources & References

1. OECD — For Good Measure: Trust and Social Capital

A foundational OECD framework for understanding and measuring social capital, including personal relationships, social-network support, civic engagement, trust and cooperation. It is particularly useful for the article's argument that social capital is multidimensional and cannot sensibly be reduced to one number.

OECD — For Good Measure: Trust and Social Capital

2. OECD — Measuring Social Connectedness in OECD Countries

This 2024 OECD working paper reviews how countries currently measure social connections, including social support, loneliness and frequency of socialising, and identifies continuing problems of consistency, frequency and comparability. It directly supports this article's argument that measurement is possible but methodologically difficult.

OECD — Measuring Social Connectedness in OECD Countries

3. OECD — Beyond GDP / Well-being Measurement

The OECD's wider well-being and Beyond GDP programme provides the international context for measuring dimensions of national progress that extend beyond conventional economic output, including social connections and trust.

OECD — Well-being and Beyond GDP

4. Government of India — Time Use Survey, 2024

The National Statistics Office, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, conducted India's second all-India Time Use Survey during January–December 2024. It measures paid and unpaid activities, including unpaid domestic work, caregiving, volunteer work, socialising, community participation and religious practice. The survey found that 1.0% of people aged six and above participated in unpaid volunteer, trainee and other unpaid work on the reference day, while 90.3% participated in socialising, communication, community participation and religious practice.

Government of India — Time Use Survey 2024

5. World Bank — A Matter of Trust: Social Capital and Economic Development

This World Bank research examines the relationship between interpersonal networks, trust and economic development while also warning that social capital can produce negative outcomes when networks are directed toward narrow interests. This is particularly important for the article's argument that social capital should not automatically be treated as beneficial.

World Bank — A Matter of Trust: Social Capital and Economic Development

6. World Bank — Social Capital and Development

The World Bank's broader research on social capital provides the theoretical foundation for examining trust, networks, cooperation and institutional relationships as factors affecting development and collective action.

World Bank — Social Capital and Development Research

7. Indian Evidence — Social Capital and Childhood Immunisation in Rural Uttar Pradesh

The empirical study used in the article examined 2,239 children, 1,749 households and 346 communities and found an association between community-level social cohesion and completion of the third DPT vaccination dose. The study reported an adjusted odds ratio of 1.25. Importantly, the article correctly presents this as an association rather than proof that social capital alone caused the outcome.

Rural Uttar Pradesh Social Capital and Immunisation Study

Editor's Note

A Note on Evidence, Interpretation and Measurement

This article examines social capital as an analytical concept, not as a universally recognised financial asset with a single monetary value.

The term “social capital” has been defined and measured differently across economics, sociology, political science and development research. This article therefore draws on established frameworks from institutions including the OECD and World Bank while recognising that there is no single universally accepted method for measuring social capital. The OECD's work identifies multiple dimensions, including personal relationships, social-network support, civic engagement, trust and cooperation.

The article distinguishes between trust, social connections, civic participation, volunteering, social cohesion, institutional confidence and resilience. These concepts overlap, but they are not interchangeable. References to their potential economic or institutional value should therefore be understood as evidence-based analytical propositions rather than claims that each can be converted directly into a rupee value.

The discussion of India's 2024 Time Use Survey is based on official data from the National Statistics Office. The survey measures how people allocate time across paid and unpaid activities, including domestic work, caregiving, volunteering, socialising, community participation and religious practice. These measurements are used here as evidence that aspects of social activity can be statistically observed; they are not presented as direct measures of social capital.

Where empirical research is cited, the article preserves the distinction between association and causation. The rural Uttar Pradesh immunisation study, for example, found an association between community-level social cohesion and childhood immunisation outcomes. The finding does not establish that social capital alone caused the observed difference. That distinction is essential when interpreting social-capital research.

The article also uses expressions such as “social-capital balance sheet,” “resilience capital” and “social infrastructure” as analytical frameworks. They are not presented as established categories within India's national accounting system. In particular, “resilience capital” is used here as a conceptual description of the capacity that social networks may contribute to a community's ability to absorb and respond to shocks.

The discussion of religious institutions is deliberately non-sectarian. Temples, churches, mosques, gurdwaras and other religious institutions are referenced as examples of institutions that may generate volunteering, charitable activity, community networks and social support. The article does not assign a special economic or social value to any particular faith or religious organisation.

The article does not argue that GDP is obsolete. GDP remains an essential measure of economic production and activity. Nor does the article argue that social capital should simply be converted into monetary terms and inserted into GDP. The proposition is narrower: economic output does not capture every form of social and institutional capacity relevant to a country's long-term development, resilience and ability to cooperate.

The purpose of the investigation is therefore not to put a price on human relationships.

It is to ask whether India can become better at seeing, measuring and understanding the social capacities that allow millions of people to cooperate.

And that distinction matters.

Because once something becomes visible in reliable data, policymakers can begin asking a much harder question:

What should they do with it?

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