Financial inclusion in India: Review and research agenda

Financial inclusion is a systematic effort to provide essential financial services to all and especially to poor people. This concept has been pushed up by government of India and RBI because even after so many years of independence high population of India remain unbanked because high population of India lives in rural area and poor people and they are not literate enough to understand the pros and cons of various essential financial services. In this paper efforts are made to review various schemes initiated by Government, RBI and others to promote financial inclusion. Further a comprehensive literature is surveyed to find the scope of future research in this area by identifying: research gap; possible objectives and hypotheses for research, statistical techniques can be used, etc. A model has been presented in this paper to explore various dimensions of financial inclusion. Financial inclusion has increased in overall in India but its effectiveness is still doubted.