Financial exclusion is bad for banks too

....Financial inclusion is good business for banks especially if farmers use their increasingly sophisticated services and products to transact their farm produce. That is why deputy governors of the RBI have variously announced the importance of FI in the RBI's agenda for banks. As part of its platinum jubilee celebration two years ago, the Deputy Governor, Mr K.C. Chakrabarty, spoke on various occasions on television, to print media, about the RBI's three-year plan for including the excluded, for bringing banks to every Indian. Another Deputy Governor, the now retired Ms Usha Thorat, talked of using High Technology for the purpose; financial inclusion became the new currency for banks and New Delhi to trade their policymaking craft in. But all those bent on standing on the right side of FI missed the irony that more than four decades after bank nationalisation, India's formal banking system excluded far more segments than it included. Banking in India despite the pious political rhetoric was still an exclusive domain for the few......

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