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How comprehensive is financial inclusion in India?
Journal of Payments Strategy & Systems,
9
(2),
148-155
(2015)
Abstract
A massive and ambitious financial inclusion project has been launched by the Honourable Prime Minister of India under Prime Minister Jan Dhan Yojna (PMJDY), with a target of bringing 75 million unbanked households into the formal financial system within a target period of five months, with the idea that there should be a minimum of one bank account per household. Over 125 million accounts were opened during the period envisaged. There are very few parallels to such initiative in any part of the world, and early indications are that the project has been a success — not only for the size (opening of 100 million bank accounts in five months), but also for the comprehensiveness of the project.
Keywords: financial inclusion; Aadhaar Card; PMJDY; business correspondents; eKYC
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Author's Biography
A. P. Hota has been Managing Director & CEO of National Payments Corporation of India since February 2009. A significant part of his career has been in the area of the design and implementation of payment systems in India. He has played a key role in the implementation of MICR technology in cheque clearing, electronic funds transfer, automated clearing houses, cheque truncation systems and Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) systems in India. In August 2010 he joined as the Managing Director and CEO of National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which has been set up by banks in India to provide central infrastructure for various retail payment systems in the country, including card payments. Under his leadership, NPCI launched India’s own card scheme ‘RuPay’ in a record three years, which is now accepted on all three channels — Automated Teller Machine (ATM), Point of Sale (PoS) and eCommerce — with an issuance figure of more than 270 million RuPay cards. Under his leadership, a transformational product, the Unified Payments Interface, was also launched. He is a member of various Committees of the Government of India and Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and has contributed to policy and decision-making processes in relation to payment systems and financial inclusion in particular. He is a regular speaker at payment systems and financial inclusion conferences in India and abroad.
