Promoting Financial Inclusion - United Nations Development ...

Preface & Acknowledgements
The Paper entitled “Promoting Financial Inclusion”, commissioned by FICCI and UNDP, endeavours to
explore the status of recommendations made by 'Rangarajan Committee on Financial Inclusion' and
'Raghuram Rajan Committee on Financial Sector Reforms'. The findings presented in the paper are based on
review of policy announcements by the GoI, RBI; annual reports of RBI, NABARD and IRDA and other
institutions; research papers, academic journals; interactions with senior personnel at RBI and NABARD to
understand their perspective on financial inclusion and study of implementation of financial inclusion
initiatives of some selected institutions. The Paper has been organized as follows:
Chapter 1 & 2: provide a background to the debate around financial inclusion and captures various
perspectives in understanding the concept.
Chapter 3: discusses the extent of financial inclusion by analysing the penetration of banks and other
institutions in making available various financial services (including credit, savings and insurance) to the
excluded.
Chapter 4: elucidates the policy initiatives of GoI, RBI, IRDA and NABARD towards financial promotion of
inclusion initiatives. The chapter also enumerates the limitations and pitfalls of some policies/norms in
achievement of financial inclusion targets.
Chapter 5: is divided into two parts, wherein the first part explains the various broad policy level challenges
and the second part explicates the product/service specific challenges faced by implementers and endbeneficiaries
in mass dissemination and use of financial products/services offered to promote financially
inclusive growth.
Chapter 6: provides the broad perspective of the issues related to financial inclusion and analyses the
constraints and tradeoff s related to various policy initiatives related to financial inclusion.
A separate section provides in-depth case studies done with 4 stakeholders such as technology service
providers, banking training institutes and banking correspondents to highlight the achievement and gaps in the
provision of financially inclusive services.
Annexures on Client protection principles, salient features of BC model, list of projects sanctioned under FIF
and FITF, key features and current status of implementation of the cooperative sector revival package provide
useful information related to Financial Inclusion are provided at the end of the study.
FICCI would like to express its sincere gratitude to UNDP and NABARD for providing financial assistance to
undertake this study under NABARD-UNDP Collaboration for Financial Inclusion in seven UNDP focus
states.
We appreciate the support extended by Mr Sanjay Sinha, Managing Director, M-CRIL in mobilizing his team
of researchers to put up this well researched report. This work would not have been possible without the
timely and whole hearted effort of Mr Sinha and his team. Their untiring effort in providing overall direction