New Delhi, March 26 -- Her name is Lakshmi. She lives in a small village in the Krishna delta, Andhra Pradesh, where the fields flood in September and the nearest bank branch is a one-hour bus ride away. She wants to buy a buffalo, not as an aspiration, but as a business plan. A government scheme could fund it. But she cannot read or fill a form and has no one to help her navigate the paperwork.

The bank exists. The scheme exists. The money exists. The gap is not financial. It's procedural. And procedural complexity, invisible to those of us who navigate it daily, is one of the most efficient destroyers of wealth in India.

This is the problem at the heart of a white paper I co-authored with colleagues from MIT, IIT Kanpur, IISc and othe...