Financial inclusion in India : Some Key Statistics

India has around 403 million mobile users of whom, about 46%, or 187 million, don't even have bank accounts. People can do without bank accounts but not mobile phones. Nearly 400 million Indians have bank accounts. That’s less than 40% of the country’s population. About 40% Indians have check-in accounts. 51 out of every 100 Indians had bank accounts in 1993. This has marginally gone up to 54 in 2007.

59% of adult population in India has bank accounts and that there is a large gap between the coverage of banking services in urban and rural pockets. In rural India, the coverage among the adult population is 39% against 60% in urban India. This, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean that 60 out of every 100 Indian adults in cities have bank accounts as many people operate multiple accounts.

45 million Indians invest in mutual funds. This is about 4% of India’s population. The comparable figure for the US is 31%. When it comes to direct investment in equities, the number drops drastically and only 15 million Indians hold demat (electronic share) accounts that one needs to buy stocks.

Nearly 80% of the Indian population is without life, health and non-life insurance coverage. While life insurance penetration is 4%, non-life cover is even lower at 0.6%. The per capita spend on life and non-life insurance is just about Rs2,000 and Rs300, respectively, compared with a global average of at least Rs18,000 and Rs13,000.

Only 5.2% of India’s 650,000 villages have bank branches even though 39.7% of the overall branch network of Indian banks, or 31,727, are in rural India. The population covered by each branch has come down from 63,000 in 1969 to 16,000 in 2007 and the total number of check-in accounts held at commercial banks, regional rural banks, primary agricultural credit societies, urban cooperative banks and post offices during this period has risen from 454.6 million to 610.3 million. Still, very few people in the low-income bracket have access to formal banking channels. Only 34% of people with annual earnings less than Rs50,000 in urban India had a bank account in 2007. The comparative figure in rural India is even lower, 26.8%.