IITM Journal of Management and IT

Economic growth is facilitated by participation of all the sections of society ensuring higher level of financial inclusion. It is necessary to provide some index to measure this important factor in both developed as well as developing economies. It requires to study various dimensions that can be used to indicate financial inclusion through various parameters. The present study contributes towards the field by developing a robust and comprehensive measure for measuring the financial inclusion in a country. The Financial Inclusion Index (FII) is computed using the three elementary dimensions -Availability, Accessibility and Usage of banking services by all sections of the society. These dimensions are assigned fixed weights to create a robust index for analysis of financial inclusion. The index value is categorised into varying ranges—Low, Medium and High, indicating the degree of financial inclusion from 1996 to 2022. The study finds the rise in the financial inclusion level of India in later half of the study period mainly due to radical upliftment in financial policy transformations for underprivileged sections of the society.