Financial Inclusion in India: Its Prospects, Scopes and Challenges

Abstract

The major focus of the Union Budget for the financial year 2011-12, 2012-13 and 2013-14 was to achieve the larger aim of the financial inclusion. It focuses on the poor who do not enjoy the formal financial institutional support and get them out of the clutches of local money lenders. The objective of the study is to identify the difficulties that Government of India is facing to implement the concept of financial inclusion. Simultaneously, this research work will focus on developing the marketing strategies of the financial instruments to the rural population where a signification portion of the population are suffering from poverty, inequality, unemployment, illiteracy and superstition. Another dimension of the study is to develop the investor awareness programs in suburban area and remote villages by which maximum retail participation in capital market can be ensured. Since socio-economically rural residents are the most vulnerable portion of the society, it is the ethical, moral and social responsibility for the Government to ensure that the downtrodden common mass of the country receive protection from the risk of mis-selling by the unscrupulous financial intermediaries. The methodology used for the proposed study is based on secondary information available from several research articles prevalent in the different reputed national and international journals in the sphere of financial inclusion. Similarly the data has been collected from the RBI database, the annual reports of SEBI and IRDA as well as from the different published reports. The dream of real financial inclusion will be materialized only when the entire population of the nation will be able to become the beneficiary from the different financial reforms made by the different regulatory apex bodies of the country such as RBI, SEBI and IRDA.