Insurance as National Infrastructure: Building Systemic Resilience through Transaction-Based Premiums

This paper starts from a simple question: why is insurance treated as a discretionary financial product when the risks it addresses are systemic and unavoidable? It argues that insurance is more usefully understood as national infrastructure—similar in function to roads, power, or digital payment rails—rather than as an optional private purchase. To operationalize this idea, the paper proposes a Transaction-Based Premium (TBP) framework in which a very small, almost invisible contribution is generated through routine digital transactions and pooled into a universal national risk fund. The focus is not on creating a new tax or welfare scheme, but on redesigning how risk is financed and shared in a digitally connected economy. India is used as the primary institutional context because it already operates population-scale digital public infrastructure for identity, payments, and benefit delivery. The paper explores how embedding insurance into these economic flows could reduce household risk aversion, speed up claims through event-linked triggers, lower fraud, and encourage greater investment in skills, mobility, and entrepreneurship. The paper is conceptual and design-oriented. It does not claim that any country has fully implemented such a system. Instead, it brings together existing institutional components into a single, scalable design intended to inform policy experimentation, regulatory sandboxes, and future empirical research.