THE TRUST ECONOMY: Why Social Capital May Be India's Most Undervalued National Asset

 

THE INVISIBLE ASSET

India has become remarkably good at counting things that can be priced. It measures gross domestic product, industrial output, tax collections, exports, household consumption, infrastructure investment and financial flows with increasing sophistication. It can tell us how much steel was produced, how many kilometres of roads were built, how much money moved through the banking system and how much a household spent last month. Yet there is another form of capital moving through the country every day that rarely appears in those accounts. It is the willingness of one person to help another, the confidence that a neighbour will respond in a crisis, the relationship between a community and the local health worker, the volunteer who gives time without expecting a wage, or the organisation that can persuade people to cooperate because it has spent twenty years earning their confidence. The question is deceptively simple: what is that worth?

Economists do not have a single universally accepted definition of social capital, and that is important because the concept can become vague very quickly. The OECD describes social capital, in one of its measurement frameworks, as shared norms, values and understandings that facilitate cooperation within and among groups. The wider literature has used the term differently: Pierre Bourdieu connected it to resources embedded in networks, James Coleman examined the way social structures facilitate actions, and Robert Putnam emphasised networks, norms and trust that enable coordination and cooperation. The World Bank has similarly described social capital through institutions, relationships, attitudes and values that influence social and economic development. The definitions differ, but they converge around an important idea: relationships can contain productive capacity.

That productive capacity becomes visible when cooperation is difficult. A transaction between strangers requires information, verification, contracts and mechanisms for resolving disputes. A community project requires people to believe that others will contribute rather than simply wait for someone else to do the work. A public-health campaign requires people to believe that the information they are receiving is credible and that participating will not leave them worse off. A disaster response requires people to share information, identify vulnerable households, move resources and trust someone enough to coordinate the effort. Trust does not eliminate these costs, but it can reduce some of the friction that stands between intention and collective action.

This is why social capital has attracted the attention of economists and development institutions. The World Bank has described trust as central to cooperation and has noted that social networks and norms can reduce uncertainty, transaction costs and opportunistic behaviour while facilitating cooperation in markets and organisations. More recently, the Bank has described trust as a form of “human infrastructure” for jobs and development, linking trust among people, trust in institutions and confidence in systems such as markets and contracts to economic activity. The argument is not that trust automatically produces prosperity. It is more precise than that: where people can reasonably expect others and institutions to behave predictably, some forms of cooperation become easier, less costly and less risky.

India provides an unusually rich environment in which to examine this proposition because so much of its social infrastructure exists below the level at which conventional economic statistics become visible. A village organisation may have a tiny budget but know which households are vulnerable during a flood. A women's collective may manage modest savings but create relationships that allow members to share information, access finance and negotiate collectively. A local health worker may have no authority to compel a family to vaccinate a child but may possess something more difficult to build: credibility. A religious institution may collect donations, distribute food and mobilise volunteers without describing any of this activity as the production of social capital.

The distinction matters because an organisation's balance sheet rarely captures the full value of its relationships. Financial statements can show salaries, assets, grants, donations and expenditure. They cannot easily show that a particular community will answer the telephone when the organisation calls for help because it has built credibility over decades. They cannot place a rupee value on local knowledge accumulated through repeated interactions. They cannot easily record the value of a volunteer network that can mobilise hundreds of people within hours. Yet these relationships can determine whether an intervention succeeds.

The NGO, therefore, may not be the deepest asset. The deeper asset may be the network around it.

Consider a local organisation working in a rural district. Its office may be modest. Its annual budget may be smaller than the marketing budget of a medium-sized company. But its staff may know village leaders, teachers, health workers, women's groups and local volunteers. They may know which communities are suspicious of outsiders, which households need assistance and which messages will be accepted. That knowledge has not appeared overnight. It has accumulated through repeated interaction. The organisation has effectively built a stock of relationships.

That stock can become valuable when a crisis arrives.

During a disaster, for example, the formal machinery of the State may possess far greater financial resources and administrative authority than any local nonprofit. But a local network may know where the elderly live, which road is usable, which families have lost their homes and which community leaders can organise volunteers. The two forms of capacity are different. One provides scale and authority; the other can provide proximity, information and trust. The strongest response may therefore come not from choosing between the State and civil society but from combining institutional scale with local social capital.

The same logic appears in public health. A study of rural Uttar Pradesh examined the relationship between social capital and childhood immunisation across 2,239 children, 1,749 households and 346 communities. It found that community-level social cohesion among mothers was associated with completion of the third dose of DPT vaccination, with an adjusted odds ratio of 1.25. The study did not establish that social capital alone caused higher vaccination, and it would be wrong to turn the finding into a sweeping claim about every health programme. What it does demonstrate is more modest and more useful: measurable features of community relationships can be associated with whether people use an essential public service.

The implication is significant. A health programme does not operate only through vaccines, clinics, budgets and medical personnel. It also operates through the relationships that determine whether people trust information, listen to frontline workers and act on what they are told. The physical infrastructure may be visible; the social infrastructure can be invisible. Yet the outcome depends on both.

India's experience with self-help groups offers another illustration. The World Bank's work on the JEEViKA programme in Bihar has documented how poor rural women were organised into self-help groups that became channels not only for finance but also for information, livelihoods and collective action. Between 2008 and 2018, the programme mobilised almost 10 million rural women into self-help groups, while the broader National Rural Livelihoods Mission subsequently scaled the model across India. The significance of these institutions is not simply the money that moves through them. The group itself becomes a repeated social interaction in which members meet, save, borrow, share information and develop the ability to act collectively.

That distinction is central to understanding the trust economy. A financial transaction can be measured. The relationship that makes repeated transactions possible is harder to see. A loan can appear on a balance sheet. The confidence that allows a woman to participate in a collective financial institution may not. A government programme can report how much money it spent. It may be much harder to quantify the local relationships that determine whether that expenditure actually produces durable behavioural change.

Social capital therefore has at least two dimensions that need to be separated. One is bonding capital: the relationships that create solidarity within a relatively close community. The other is bridging capital: relationships that connect people across communities, occupations, regions or social groups. A tightly bonded group may be exceptionally effective at helping its own members, but a society also needs connections that cross boundaries. The OECD's discussion of social capital draws on this wider intellectual tradition, while the World Bank's work on social cohesion similarly emphasises shared purpose, trust and willingness to cooperate within groups, across groups and between people and the State.

That distinction matters enormously in a country as large and diverse as India. A society can have strong internal networks and still struggle with trust across social boundaries. A community may cooperate intensely among its own members while remaining suspicious of outsiders. A professional association may create enormous benefits for its members while excluding others. A religious community can mobilise extraordinary generosity internally while having limited bridges to other communities. Social capital is therefore not automatically a public good simply because it involves trust.

This is where the romantic version of the trust economy needs to be rejected.

Trust can create cooperation, but networks can also create exclusion. Social solidarity can produce mutual support, but it can also reinforce conformity. Strong relationships can reduce uncertainty for insiders while increasing barriers for outsiders. A network that helps one group obtain jobs, credit or influence can become a mechanism of patronage if access depends on connections rather than fair rules. The World Bank's own literature on social capital has warned that networks can produce undesirable outcomes when directed toward narrow interests or rent-seeking.

The relevant question, therefore, is not whether social capital is good or bad. It is what kind of social capital produces broad public value.

That question changes the way civil society itself should be understood. An organisation should not be judged only by how much money it raises or how many programmes it runs. Its deeper contribution may sometimes lie in the relationships it makes possible. Does it connect communities that otherwise rarely interact? Does it build confidence between citizens and institutions? Does it help people cooperate around a common problem? Does it create networks that survive after a particular project ends? Does it develop local leaders and volunteers who remain active when the organisation is no longer present?

These are difficult questions because they move beyond the conventional economics of inputs and outputs. Development programmes are often evaluated by asking how much was spent and what immediate outcome followed. But social capital can operate on a longer time horizon. A community meeting that appears insignificant today may establish relationships that become crucial during tomorrow's flood. A women's group that begins with savings may eventually become a platform for health information, entrepreneurship and collective bargaining. A local charity that distributes food may gradually become a trusted bridge between government services and households that otherwise remain disconnected from formal institutions.

The economic significance of these relationships lies partly in what they prevent. When trust is absent, people spend more time checking, verifying, negotiating and protecting themselves against uncertainty. When institutional credibility is weak, governments may need more enforcement to achieve compliance. When communities cannot coordinate, programmes may require more outside intervention. When local networks are weak during a disaster, resources may arrive late or fail to reach the households that need them most. The value of social capital can therefore appear not only in what society produces but also in the friction it avoids.

This is one reason the World Bank has increasingly treated trust and social cohesion as development concerns rather than merely sociological ones. Its recent work describes trust as important to risk-taking, networks and collective action, and institutional legitimacy. The basic proposition is not revolutionary: people and organisations cooperate more readily when they have reason to believe that others will behave predictably and that institutions will act fairly. What is revolutionary is what happens when that proposition is treated as a form of infrastructure rather than a matter of personal character.

India's civil-society sector sits directly inside this invisible infrastructure. Its organisations may deliver education, health services, livelihoods programmes, disaster relief, environmental protection or community development, but they may also accumulate something less visible: trust. They learn how communities function. They build relationships with volunteers. They develop local knowledge. They create channels through which information can travel. They sometimes become institutions that people turn to not because they are legally required to do so, but because they believe the organisation will respond.

That accumulated trust has a peculiar economic characteristic. It is expensive to build, difficult to transfer and surprisingly easy to destroy.

A new organisation can rent an office tomorrow. It can buy computers next week. It can hire staff next month. It cannot purchase twenty years of community credibility with a cheque. That credibility is produced through repeated behaviour. People observe whether promises are kept, whether money is handled responsibly, whether information is accurate, whether vulnerable people are treated fairly and whether the organisation remains present when the attention of donors or governments moves elsewhere.

This makes trust a form of institutional memory.

A community does not simply remember an organisation's name. It remembers what happened the last time it arrived. That memory can determine whether people cooperate the next time. In this sense, trust behaves differently from physical capital. A bridge can be inspected and its replacement cost estimated. Social credibility has no comparable invoice. Yet its absence can impose very real costs.

The same principle applies to the State. Government programmes do not operate in a vacuum. Citizens form judgments about whether institutions are competent, honest and responsive. The OECD's work on trust treats institutional trust and interpersonal trust as distinct but related concepts and notes that perceptions of institutional performance and integrity are important determinants of trust. The organisation of public services therefore matters not only because it determines what the State delivers but because repeated institutional performance can influence whether citizens believe the State will deliver in the future.

This creates a chain that deserves greater attention in India's development debate: trust can encourage cooperation; cooperation can strengthen institutions; stronger institutions can improve outcomes; and repeated positive outcomes can reinforce trust. The relationship can work in the opposite direction as well. Broken promises can weaken trust, weakened trust can reduce cooperation, reduced cooperation can make institutions less effective and institutional failure can further damage confidence.

That makes social capital different from a conventional asset. A factory depreciates when machinery wears out. Social capital can depreciate when relationships deteriorate. A road can be repaired with money. Trust cannot be repaired simply by increasing a budget. It requires repeated evidence that behaviour has changed.

The consequences become especially visible during crises. A disaster compresses time. There is less opportunity for elaborate verification, long procurement cycles or carefully designed institutional coordination. People need information quickly, vulnerable households need to be identified and resources need to move. Communities with established relationships can sometimes respond faster because they already know whom to call and whom to trust. This does not make local networks a substitute for professional disaster management; it means that formal systems may become more effective when they can work through trusted community structures. The World Bank's work on resilient communities in South Asia has repeatedly emphasised the role of local participation and community engagement alongside physical and institutional resilience.

This is why India's civil-society ecosystem may be producing something much larger than the services recorded in its annual reports. It may be producing social infrastructure.

The phrase matters because infrastructure changes how we think about investment. Roads are not valuable merely because concrete exists. They are valuable because they connect people to markets, schools and hospitals. Digital networks are not valuable merely because cables and servers exist. They are valuable because they allow information and transactions to move. Social networks are similarly valuable not merely because relationships exist, but because those relationships can allow information, trust, assistance and collective action to move through society.

The difference is that physical and digital infrastructure are relatively easy to see. Social infrastructure is distributed across millions of interactions.

That makes it easy to underestimate.

India may know how much a new hospital costs. It may know how many beds the hospital contains. It may know how many patients it treated. But the value of a community organisation that persuades families to use the hospital, helps them navigate the system and maintains relationships with frontline workers can remain outside the accounting framework. The organisation may appear as a budget line while the network it has built remains invisible.

This is the deeper proposition behind the trust economy: some of the assets required for development are not things that organisations own. They are relationships that organisations make possible.

The problem is that once we recognise this, another problem immediately appears. If trust, cooperation, networks and resilience have genuine social and economic consequences, how should they be measured? How do we distinguish a strong community network from a weak one? How do we estimate the value of volunteer time? How do we measure whether people trust institutions? How do we know whether an organisation has created durable social capital or merely completed another project?

These questions cannot be answered by looking at an NGO's balance sheet.

They require a different kind of national accounting—one capable of seeing assets that do not always enter markets, relationships that cannot be purchased instantly and contributions whose value may emerge only when a community faces a crisis.

And that brings the investigation to its next question.

India has spent decades becoming better at measuring what its economy produces. But can it begin measuring what allows society to cooperate, absorb shocks and function?

Because if trust really is a form of capital, the country may have been carrying one of its most important assets without ever putting it properly on the balance sheet.

CAN TRUST BECOME NATIONAL CAPITAL?

The difficulty begins precisely where the argument becomes most interesting. If trust, relationships, volunteering, cooperation and community networks can influence whether institutions function and whether development reaches people, then they should leave some measurable trace. Yet conventional economic accounting was not designed to capture most of them. Gross domestic product records market production and the value of goods and services exchanged through the economy. It does not automatically record the economic value of a neighbour helping another neighbour, a volunteer spending a weekend distributing food or a community organisation preventing a local crisis from becoming a larger one. The problem is therefore not that these activities have no value. It is that much of their value falls outside the transactions that national accounts are designed to observe.

This is one reason the debate around social capital has increasingly become a debate about measurement. The OECD has explicitly identified the difficulty: social capital encompasses several distinct dimensions, including personal relationships, social-network support, civic engagement, and trust and cooperative norms. The organisation has also noted that the lack of agreement about how social capital should be defined and measured has slowed its incorporation into official statistics and made international comparisons difficult. That is an important warning for India. Before putting a rupee value on social capital, the country would first need to decide exactly what it is trying to measure.

One component may be easier to approach than the others: volunteering. A person who gives ten hours a week to a community organisation has contributed labour even if no wage has been paid. The absence of a transaction does not mean the absence of an activity. Economists can theoretically estimate the replacement cost of unpaid work by considering what equivalent paid labour might cost. Such an exercise would not tell us the full social value of volunteering, but it would at least make one part of the invisible economy more visible.

That distinction matters enormously in India because volunteering is woven into many kinds of institutions. People give time through charitable organisations, religious institutions, community groups, educational institutions, neighbourhood associations, disaster-response networks and informal local initiatives. Much of this activity is not recorded in a way that allows it to be aggregated into a national estimate of social contribution. The result is a strange asymmetry: the financial expenditure of an organisation may be visible, while the unpaid human effort that allows the organisation to function can remain almost completely invisible.

Yet volunteer hours alone would not solve the measurement problem. Two organisations could mobilise the same number of volunteers and create very different outcomes. One might spend thousands of hours duplicating work that another organisation performs efficiently in a fraction of the time. One volunteer network might be open to outsiders and strengthen cooperation across communities; another might reinforce an exclusive social group. Measuring hours therefore tells us something about effort, but not necessarily about trust, quality, inclusion or impact.

This is where the distinction between social capital and ordinary labour becomes important. Social capital is not simply the number of relationships people possess. It concerns the quality and function of those relationships: whether they enable cooperation, provide support, create access to information, strengthen civic participation or increase trust. The OECD's framework deliberately separates these dimensions because each captures a different aspect of social life. A society can have dense networks without necessarily having high levels of generalized trust, just as people can participate in community organisations without trusting public institutions.

India's religious institutions make this measurement problem even more interesting. Temples, churches, mosques, gurdwaras and other religious institutions can mobilise donations, volunteers, food distribution, education, healthcare, disaster assistance and community support. The value created by these activities does not disappear simply because it is motivated by faith rather than by a commercial transaction. Nor should religious organisations be treated as a single homogeneous category. Their structures, purposes and social roles differ enormously. The analytical point is narrower: religious networks form part of India's wider social infrastructure, and any serious attempt to understand social capital cannot simply exclude them because their activities do not fit neatly into conventional economic categories.

This also explains why the funding question examined in Article 1 cannot be the whole story. Knowing how much money enters an organisation tells us something important about its financial capacity. It tells us much less about the social relationships accumulated through years of work. Two organisations with identical annual budgets may have radically different levels of institutional trust. One may be a new organisation still trying to establish credibility. The other may have decades of relationships with communities, volunteers and local institutions. Their financial statements could look similar while their underlying social capital is very different.

That accumulated capital can also influence the effectiveness of public spending. Imagine two government programmes with identical budgets, identical staffing levels and identical technical designs. One operates in communities where local institutions are trusted and where people already cooperate around common problems. The other operates where institutions are viewed with suspicion, information travels poorly and collective action is weak. The expenditure may be identical. The outcomes need not be.

This does not mean that social capital is a magic ingredient that guarantees successful development. Economic resources, administrative capacity, infrastructure, professional competence and sound policy remain essential. Trust cannot compensate for the absence of a functioning hospital, a trained health worker or an adequate budget. But where those inputs already exist, the quality of relationships surrounding them can influence how effectively they are used. The OECD has similarly linked institutional trust to the implementation of public programmes, regulations and reforms because those policies depend on citizen cooperation and compliance.

The implication is particularly important for a country as large and administratively diverse as India. National programmes are designed at scale, but their implementation eventually encounters local realities. A policy may be uniform on paper while the social conditions surrounding it vary enormously from one district to another. Local civil-society organisations can sometimes provide information, relationships and credibility that a centralised system cannot manufacture quickly. Their role is therefore not necessarily to replace government, but to connect national capacity with local knowledge.

This is where the idea of linking social capital becomes important. Bonding capital connects people within relatively close groups. Bridging capital connects different groups. Linking capital connects communities to institutions that possess greater resources or authority. The three can interact. A women's collective may build strong internal relationships, connect with other community groups and eventually establish relationships with banks, government departments or healthcare institutions. The result is a network that moves information and resources across different levels of society. OECD analysis similarly describes social capital as operating through personal relationships, civic engagement, trust and connections between civil society and the State.

That architecture becomes especially valuable during a crisis. A disaster does not wait for institutions to establish relationships from scratch. Communities need to know who can provide assistance, where information can be trusted and which local actors can mobilise people quickly. A strong network can reduce the time required to coordinate. It can also help outside institutions understand local conditions. The economic value may therefore appear as avoided losses, faster recovery or more efficient use of resources rather than as revenue generated by a market transaction.

This suggests another way to think about social capital: as resilience capital. A community with strong networks may possess greater capacity to absorb a shock because people know one another, information travels through established channels and collective responses can be organised more quickly. That does not mean every close-knit community is resilient, nor that social capital eliminates vulnerability. A community can have strong internal bonds and still lack money, infrastructure or access to formal institutions. But social relationships can form one layer of the capacity required to recover.

The reverse is also true. Social capital can be destroyed. Repeated institutional failure can reduce trust. Corruption can make people less willing to cooperate. Broken promises can weaken confidence. Discrimination can prevent networks from becoming bridges. Polarisation can transform social relationships into opposing camps. Misinformation can undermine confidence in institutions and experts. Once these processes become entrenched, rebuilding trust can be much harder than constructing a physical asset.

This is why social capital should not be romanticised as an inherently positive force. A strong network can distribute assistance, but it can also distribute privilege. A community can cooperate internally while excluding outsiders. A trusted leader can mobilise people for a public purpose or manipulate the same network for private gain. A tightly connected organisation can become resilient or insular. The World Bank literature has long warned that social capital can have negative consequences when networks are directed toward narrow interests or rent-seeking. The relevant policy objective is therefore not maximum social connectedness at any cost. It is social capital that expands cooperation without turning networks into instruments of exclusion.

That distinction is especially important when discussing civil society. An organisation's contribution should not be measured simply by the number of people it knows. The more meaningful question is what those relationships enable. Do they help different communities cooperate? Do they increase access to information? Do they connect vulnerable people to institutions? Do they strengthen participation? Do they create trust that survives beyond a single project? Do they expand the circle of people who can work together rather than simply making an existing group more tightly organised?

These questions point toward a different kind of evaluation. Traditional programme evaluation tends to begin with inputs, activities and outputs. How much money was spent? How many people were trained? How many clinics were held? How many households received assistance? Those questions remain necessary. But social capital introduces another dimension: what relationships were strengthened, what networks were created, what institutional confidence changed and whether the capacity to cooperate survived after the programme ended.

That last question may be the most important. A programme can deliver a successful intervention and disappear. Another can leave behind institutions capable of continuing the work. The second organisation may have created a larger long-term asset even if its immediate output figures look similar. In that sense, social capital resembles infrastructure: its value may lie partly in what it enables other people to do after the original investment has been made.

The problem is that governments and donors often have stronger incentives to measure immediate outputs than accumulated relationships. A number of beneficiaries can be reported quickly. A change in trust may take years to establish. A completed training session can be counted. A network capable of responding during a future emergency cannot easily be assigned a comparable metric. This creates a measurement bias toward what is visible in the short term.

India's development story makes that bias increasingly important. As the country becomes more urban, more digitally connected and more economically complex, the relationships required for cooperation are also changing. People increasingly interact with institutions they do not personally know. Workers migrate between regions. Businesses operate across state boundaries. Citizens receive information through digital networks. Government services increasingly depend on technology. These changes make bridging and linking forms of social capital more important because people need to cooperate beyond the traditional boundaries of neighbourhood, caste, occupation, language and locality.

The challenge is therefore not simply to preserve old forms of community. It is to build forms of trust that can function in a much larger and more complex society. Trust between citizen and institution becomes important. Trust between businesses and communities becomes important. Trust between government and civil society becomes important. Trust in digital systems becomes important. And trust across social boundaries becomes increasingly valuable because India's economic future depends on interactions among people who may have little direct history with one another.

This brings us to a concept that deserves much greater attention in India's development debate: the social-capital balance sheet.

Imagine a national balance sheet with two broad categories. On one side are the assets that are easy to see and price: roads, ports, factories, hospitals, financial institutions, telecommunications networks and digital infrastructure. On the other are assets that are much harder to observe directly: trust, volunteer capacity, community networks, local knowledge, reciprocity, institutional legitimacy and the ability to cooperate during crises.

The analogy is not intended to suggest that these assets can simply be added together. They cannot. A kilometre of highway and a community's trust in its local health worker are fundamentally different things. The point is that both can influence what a society is capable of doing. The physical infrastructure provides capacity; the social infrastructure can determine how effectively people use that capacity together.

The same logic applies to economic growth. A country can become richer while some of its social relationships deteriorate. GDP can rise while trust in institutions falls. Household incomes can increase while community participation declines. Digital connectivity can expand while social polarisation deepens. None of these outcomes is inevitable, but the possibility reveals the limitation of using economic output as the sole indicator of national progress.

This is precisely why the international debate has moved beyond GDP. The OECD's work on well-being and social capital explicitly treats trust, civic engagement and social connections as dimensions relevant to measuring how societies are doing, while its work on “Beyond GDP” has argued that social capital and trust can support the functioning of markets and institutions even though they are not fully represented in conventional economic accounts.

For India, the question is not whether GDP should be abandoned. It should not. GDP remains indispensable for understanding production, income and economic activity. The question is whether GDP should be treated as the complete balance sheet of national progress. If social capital influences institutional effectiveness, resilience, participation and cooperation, then a country interested in long-term development needs additional instruments for seeing those dimensions.

The first instrument could be better measurement of trust itself. Surveys can ask whether people believe that most people can be trusted, whether they trust institutions, whether they believe public authorities treat people fairly and whether they expect others to behave honestly. These measures are imperfect and culturally sensitive, but they are not impossible. The OECD has developed international guidance for measuring trust precisely because trust can be studied through carefully designed survey questions.

The second could be measurement of civic participation. How many people volunteer? How often? Through what kinds of organisations? How much time do they contribute? Do they participate in community groups? Do they engage in collective action? Are these networks becoming broader or narrower over time? Such measures would not capture the whole of social capital, but they would reveal whether citizens are participating in the networks that sustain collective life.

The third could be measurement of social-network support and resilience. Do people have someone they can turn to in a crisis? Can households access practical or financial help through their networks? How quickly can communities mobilise during disasters? Do local institutions cooperate? These questions begin to translate an abstract concept into observable behaviour.

The fourth could be institutional trust. Citizens' confidence in government, courts, police, schools, hospitals, local authorities and civil-society organisations can influence whether they use services, comply with rules and participate in programmes. Measuring this consistently over time could provide policymakers with an early warning system. A sudden fall in trust may not immediately appear in GDP or tax receipts, but it can signal a weakening of the social conditions required for effective governance.

The fifth could be the measurement of organisational networks themselves. Instead of asking only how many NGOs exist, India could examine how many organisations collaborate, how many communities they connect, how many government programmes they help implement and whether partnerships persist over time. This would transform the question from organisational inventory to network capacity.

None of these measurements should be mistaken for a perfect valuation of social capital. That is impossible. Human relationships cannot be reduced to one number without losing something important. The objective would be more modest: make the invisible partially visible.

That is also why a future Indian social-capital framework should resist the temptation to create one grand “trust score.” A single national score could become politically attractive but analytically misleading. Trust is multidimensional. People may trust family members but not strangers, local organisations but not government, businesses but not political institutions. A country could have strong bonding networks and weak bridging networks. A community could have high internal solidarity and low tolerance for outsiders.

Measurement should therefore reveal those differences rather than hide them.

The larger lesson is that civil society may be generating an asset that the country currently sees only in fragments. Its organisations raise money, employ people and deliver programmes, but they also build relationships. Those relationships can support cooperation, move information, connect citizens to institutions and help communities absorb shocks. The economic value is often indirect, but indirect does not mean imaginary.

The next question is whether India should begin treating these forms of social capital as part of the country's broader conception of national wealth.

That does not require putting a rupee price on every act of kindness. It requires something more practical: recognising that a society's capacity to trust, cooperate and organise is itself a form of national capacity.

The country already measures what it owns. It increasingly measures what it produces. It measures what it consumes and what it invests. The missing question is whether it can also measure what allows millions of people to act together.

That is where the argument moves beyond the trust economy and into the next frontier of national measurement.

Because once we accept that trust, volunteering, civic participation, cooperation and resilience have consequences that matter for development, the question can no longer be avoided:

Should India start measuring social capital?

And if it does, what should count?

Sources & References

1. OECD — For Good Measure: Trust and Social Capital
The OECD's foundational framework for defining social capital, including networks, shared norms, civic engagement, social-network support, trust and cooperation. It also documents the difficulty of achieving a universally accepted method of measuring social capital.

OECD — Trust and Social Capital

2. OECD — Measuring Social Capital for Place Transformation (2026)
A particularly relevant contemporary source for this investigation. The OECD examines emerging ways of measuring social capital through surveys, administrative data and digital sources, while also highlighting problems of privacy, representativeness and comparability.

OECD — Towards Measuring Social Capital for Place Transformation

3. OECD — Measuring Social Connectedness in OECD Countries
Useful for the article's discussion of community connectedness, belonging, social relationships and resilience, and for distinguishing social connectedness from the narrower concept of social capital.

OECD — Measuring Social Connectedness in OECD Countries

4. World Bank — Trust and Social Capital
The World Bank's research on how trust, networks and social norms can facilitate cooperation and influence economic and institutional outcomes. This supports the article's argument that trust can have consequences beyond purely social relationships.

5. World Bank — Trust and Social Inclusion: Foundations of Jobs and Development
Useful for the contemporary argument that trust functions as a form of social infrastructure and affects cooperation, networks, institutional legitimacy and economic participation.

6. Social Capital and Utilization of Immunization Service: A Multilevel Analysis in Rural Uttar Pradesh, India
The principal empirical Indian study used in the article. It analysed 2,239 children, 1,749 households and 346 communities and found an association between community-level maternal social cohesion and DPT3 immunisation. The study reported an adjusted odds ratio of 1.25.

Rural Uttar Pradesh Social Capital and Immunisation Study

7. World Bank — JEEViKA, Bihar
Source for the discussion of women's self-help groups, collective action, livelihoods and the development of social networks through the JEEViKA programme. The World Bank has documented the programme's large-scale mobilisation of rural women into self-help groups.

Editorial Note

A Note on Evidence, Interpretation and Measurement

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

The term “social capital” is used in different ways across economics, sociology, political science and development research. This article therefore draws on established international frameworks, particularly those developed by the OECD and World Bank, while recognising that there is no single universally accepted method for defining or measuring social capital.

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

Where Indian empirical evidence is cited, such as the rural Uttar Pradesh immunisation study, the findings are presented within the limitations of the underlying research. In particular, an observed association between social cohesion and an outcome should not automatically be interpreted as proof of direct causation.

The article also uses terms such as “social infrastructure,” “resilience capital” and “social-capital balance sheet” as analytical frameworks developed for this investigation. They are not presented as established categories in India's national accounting system.

Similarly, the discussion of religious institutions does not assign a special economic or social role to any particular faith. Temples, churches, mosques, gurdwaras and other religious institutions are referenced as examples of institutions that can generate networks, volunteering, charitable activity and community support. Their structures and social roles vary considerably.

The article does not argue that civil society should replace the State or that trust can substitute for public investment, professional expertise or functioning institutions. Its argument is narrower: physical, financial and institutional resources may work differently depending on the relationships, networks and levels of trust surrounding them.

Finally, the article does not suggest that GDP is obsolete or inadequate for measuring economic production. GDP remains an essential economic indicator. The question explored here is whether economic output alone provides a sufficiently complete picture of the social and institutional capacities that influence a country's long-term development and resilience.

The purpose of this investigation is therefore not to put a price on human relationships. It is to ask whether some of the capacities that allow societies to trust, cooperate, organise and recover deserve to become more visible in the way India understands national development.

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