Financial inclusion plan to have 30mn more accounts in FY25: Nirmala Sitharaman

The government plans to add another 30 million underprivileged citizens in the pool of over 531 million active bank accounts in the world’s biggest financial inclusion programme — the Pradhan Mantri Jan-Dhan Yojana — in the current financial year as it has shifted its focus from every household to every unbanked adult, Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on the eve of PMJDY’s 10th anniversary.
The scale of India’s financial inclusion through Jan-Dhan accounts is globally acknowledged with astonishing results in direct transfer of benefits to the beneficiaries, she said.
The scheme is striving to achieve saturation as it is an ongoing programme which will continue to include unbanked adults every year.
Launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on August 28, 2014, the scheme aimed to ensure comprehensive financial inclusion of all households in the country by providing universal access to banking facilities with at least one basic bank account to every household, financial literacy, and social security cover, she said. Now focus is shifted from every household to every adult, she added.
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According to official data, as on August 14, 2024, out of total 531.30 million PMJDY accounts, 295.60 million (55.6% of total accounts) belong to women account holders. About 99.95% of all inhabited villages have access to banking facilities within a 5km radius through banking touch points such as including bank branches, ATMs, banking correspondents (BCs), and Indian Post Payment Banks.
The number of such accounts jumped to 531.30 million now from 147.20 million in March 2015 and total deposits under PMJDY has jumped from ₹15,670 crore in March 2015 to over ₹2.31 lakh crore in August 2024, according to the latest data. The average balance in these accounts has jumped from ₹1,065 in March 2015 to ₹4,352 as on August 16, 2024, with about 80% of accounts are operative.
Jan-Dhan accounts are basic no-frill accounts without any minimum balance requirement. It offers free RuPay debit card, with in-built accident insurance cover of ₹2 lakh, access to overdraft facility of up to ₹10,000 (subject to eligibility conditions), and there are no account opening charges or account maintenance charges.
PMJDY is the foundation of Jan-Dhan, Aadhaar and mobile (JAM Trinity) that allows direct transfer of subsidies to the bank accounts of the beneficiaries, eliminating middlemen. The JAM trinity has given a boost to the direct benefit transfer (DBT) program and expanded its coverage from partial to ubiquitous, the finance ministry said in a statement.
“Today the last mile delivery of government services happens with the click of a mouse in seconds,” it said.
Jan-Dhan accounts played a pivotal role in India’s robust digital public infrastructure (DPI), built on the India Stack, a comprehensive digital identity, payment, and data-management system. The IMF in 2021 lauded the India Stack. The G20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion document prepared by the World Bank also lauded transformative impact of DPIs in India over the past decade. It said India has achieved in just six years what would have taken about five decades. The JAM Trinity propelled the financial inclusion rate from 25% in 2008 to over 80% of adults in the last six years, a journey shortened by up to 47 years because of DPIs, the statement said. In the last decade, India built one of the world’s largest digital government-to-person (G2P) architectures leveraging DPI, which “supported transfers amounting to about $361 billion directly to beneficiaries from 53 central government ministries through 312 key schemes,” it added.