Financial Inclusion in India

Existing literature on financial inclusion works with indices that use supply-side information on financial services and fail to capture demand-side information. These indices thus have a serious limitation: they might overestimate the extent of financial inclusion due to multiple bank accounts held by the same individual. Using micro-level data available from a pan-India survey, we compute a financial inclusion index for 22 states based on demand-side information. We find evidence of disagreement between the ranking of the states done on the basis of a supply-side information-based index and our demand-side information-based index. Also, exploiting the microstructure of the data, we attempt to identify some determinants of borrowing from formal sources. We find that being male, having a bank account and higher educational qualification are positively correlated with the likelihood of formal borrowing.