Report: India’s government is yet to achieve its financial inclusion goal
Friday, March 2, 2018
The government has made conscious attempts to nudge the process of financial inclusion in the last few years, but it is still far from achieving its target, finance minister Arun Jaitley said.
“If we don’t catch up in accordance with the requirements of the society, a day won’t be very far off when we are faced with serious challenges of a large section of senior citizens who are completely devoid of any form of dependency itself,” Jaitley added at the release of the latest edition of Crisil inclusix report.
Crisil inclusix is an index launched in 2013 to measure progress in financial inclusion across the country on a scale of 0 to 100. The index showed a score of 58 in fiscal 2016 as compared to 50.1 in fiscal 2013. The increase was driven by strong growth in deposits and credit accounts, the report said.
The index weighs three service providers (banks, insurers and micro-finance institutions) on four dimensions (branch, credit, deposit and insurance). The inclusion of life insurance in the index, which was included in the edition of the report launched on Wednesday, i.e. for fiscal 2016, has made it a “more comprehensive barometer”, the report said.
Photo courtesy of Satish Krishnamurthy.
