Financial Inclusion

Recently, the Reserve Bank of India has begun licensing a new kind of retail bank, called payments banks, for the hitherto financially excluded. The regulator’s argument that technological innovation will allow payments banks to achieve a seemingly impossible trilemma of financial inclusion while still being competitive and profitable is examined. The article concludes that amelioration of this trilemma will require the regulatory orientation to fundamentally change, and for the state to provide a kind of public good to all payments banks.

The clandestine nature of sex work and the stigma surrounding it restricts access to and utilisation of financial services by female sex workers, and makes it more difficult for policymakers to design appropriate programmes for their empowerment. An examination of the factors that contribute to the utilisation of financial services focused on FSWs reveals that there is an urgent need to strengthen linkages with formal banking institutions for the financial inclusion and empowerment of FSWs.

While there has been a tremendous increase in the number of bank accounts opened, the data show that the average balance in these accounts is low and a significant proportion of the accounts are inoperative. Although there was a rise in the average deposits during demonetisation, they later settled at a lower level. Further, financial inclusion means not just the opening of bank accounts but, more importantly, access to credit from formal sources. The limited data available in this regard show that after the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana was launched there has not been any increase in the credit–deposit ratio and the share of small loans has continued to decline. Very few people have benefited from the overdraft facility that is supposed to be provided by the accounts under the scheme. Issues of access to banking in rural areas remain.

Utilising household-level data, this paper investigates the impact of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme on financial inclusion. Exploiting the staggered timing of the roll-out of the programme across districts, while controlling for its non-random implementation, it is found that MGNREGS improves financial access. This is confirmed in simple univariate tests as well as in multivariate regressions that take into account several district- and household-level controls. The evidence, however, is less compelling when the use of finance is examined, although there is a differential impact for districts with higher proportion of women. The magnitudes in most cases are quite large and suggest that public works programme can positively influence financial inclusion.

The central government’s policy favouring bank mergers assumes enhanced efficiency of the merged banks through economies of scale and scope. An econometric analysis of India’s scheduled commercial banks, however, establishes that in the Indian banking sector, mergers may actually be detrimental to efficiency. This paper argues that public sector banks were set up to serve the welfare needs of the underprivileged and to promote financial inclusion, not to make profits. In the case of bank mergers, economies of scale and scope are being used to veil the promotion of economies of exclusion.