Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/249464 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Series/Report no.: 
ADBI Working Paper No. 1285
Publisher: 
Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI), Tokyo
Abstract: 
This paper discusses the business correspondent (BC)-agent banking model in India against the backdrop of community-based rural livelihood programs, its relevance in facilitating financial inclusion in underserved rural geographies, and its potential to address the gender gap in financial inclusion. In recent years, India has made significant progress toward financial inclusion with the support of technological and policy innovations, but there remains a gap in access to basic banking services for women, particularly rural women. The launch of the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) in 2014 resulted in the opening of 420 million bank accounts, of which 53.26% belonged to women, though surveys have suggested that almost 55% of women remained registered inactive users. The World Banksupported rural livelihood programs in India have been instrumental in the institutional strengthening of 6.9 million women's self-help groups (SHGs) and have facilitated their access to savings and credit to the tune of US$3.7 billion (INR260 billion) and US$56 billion (INR3600 billion), respectively, while creating an ecosystem for the deployment of female members as BC agents across rural India. The paper uses a gender and technology lens to explore the role of female banking agents in facilitating access to social security transfers using fingerprint-based biometric authentication solutions during the nationwide pandemicrelated lockdown in India between March 2020 and July 2020. Using data from multiple small samples of banking agents, this paper describes the on-the-ground challenges observed in the provision of basic banking services to access cash transfers during the pandemic. Extrapolating from this experience, the paper makes a case for strengthening the agent banking ecosystem, improving the delivery architecture for direct benefit transfers (DBTs), encouraging competition between banking service providers, and providing demand-based financial products and services to expand gender-focused financial inclusion further.
Subjects: 
Financial inclusion
gender
agent banking
India
JEL: 
G21
G23
G28
G29
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-nd Logo
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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