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Category: Business and Industry
Date Submitted: 12/05/2010 10:56 AM
F inancial i nclusion
Sameer Kochhar
s peeding
Executive Summary
Scaling-up access to finance for India’s rural poor, to meet their diverse financial needs (savings, credit, insurance, etc.) through flexible products at competitive prices, presents a formidable developmental challenge in a country as vast and varied as India. But the opportunities too are plentiful, and the government has an important role to play in creating space and a flexible architecture for innovations. Financial inclusion is, and needs to be seen as, crucial in achieving pro-poor growth and poverty reduction goals.
The past several years have seen the words 'financial inclusion' and 'inclusive growth' becoming part of the common man's glossary as well as a factor in the development agenda, cutting across the whole spectrum. In the same period, quite a bit of experimentation has happened across the country and multiple stakeholders have tried to contribute in their own ways.
It is absolutely beyond any doubt that the financial access to masses has significantly improved in the last three and a half decades, and even more so in the last 2 years. But the basic question is, has that been good enough. The quantum of deposit accounts (current and savings) held as a ratio to the adult population has not been uniformly encouraging. There is a tremendous scope for financial coverage if we have to improve the standards of life of the poor and marginalised.
The learning from various experiments undertaken in past few years provides us knowledge about the factors of success as well as failures. At this juncture, it is important to take a consolidated view of all the learnings so as to fill in the gaps and suggest a common path to speed up financial inclusion.
The study examines the possible ways to accelerate financial inclusion. In order to suggest a common strategy, Skoch undertook a nationwide multi-stakeholder i
study entitled "National Study on Speeding Financial...