Exploring Dimensions of Financial Inclusion from Stakeholders' Perspectives: Evidence from Rural Areas of Jammu District

Abstract

Reserve Bank of India devised initiatives to provide affordable and easy financial services to not only the privileged ones but also to the ignored and neglected sections of our society. Regardless of their personal net worth or the size of their organization, all individuals and organizations should be able to access and afford financial products and services according to the determinants of financial inclusion. Financial penetration is a relative small term which is used to represent the share of one credit agency relative to that of others in the credit market. In other words we can say that financial penetration is expressed in terms of loans availed by the household from different sources of credit institutions and non-institutional financial sources. As the union territory of Jammu and Kashmir comprises of different topographic and demographic regions, which include the plains, mountainous and snow-bound areas, the financial facilities are not evenly distributed all over the geographical areas of the union territory of Jammu and Kashmir. This study is confined to territorial areas of district Jammu. Many isolated villages struggle to meet their basic financial demands as a result of the lack of banking facilities. Following this scenario, to ascertain financial inclusion level of the region, a study was done using three different perspectives, including credit penetration, deposit penetration and branch penetration in remote regions of all blocks of district Jammu in the UT of Jammu and Kashmir.