While India’s financial inclusion numbers reflect progress, these coexist with metrics such as high rates of dormant bank accounts. In this note, Iyer and Ganesan contend that this dichotomy points towards a breakdown in the pipeline that is typically envisioned as starting from “access” and leading to “good outcomes”. They present an alternate impact measurement methodology, and findings from its application to a field survey.
India’s financial inclusion numbers are often presented as a policy success story. The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) Financial Inclusion Index increased from 64.2 in 2024 to 67 in 2025. Bank accounts, credit, digital payments, and insurance products have all scaled significantly over the past decade. By nearly every access metric that is traditionally tracked, the story looks like unambiguous progress.
Yet, the same period has witnessed persistently high rates of dormant accounts, a lingering non-performing asset crisis in microfinance, and multiple surveys showing that households with formal accounts still struggle to absorb even modest financial shocks. This dichotomy points to a breakdown in the pipeline we typically envision as starting from “access” and leading to “good outcomes”.
This gap between access and impact gives cause to rethink how impact is measured in financial inclusion. We submit that most impact measurement approaches in financial inclusion have been asking the wrong kind of questions. Dvara Research has developed an alternate impact measurement methodology, called the Financial Health Survey (FHS) which relies on a novel conceptual frame that offers a different way for financial service providers (FSP) to think about impact measurement. In this note, we draw on recent work at Dvara Research by laying out the novel conceptual frame (Ganesan and Iyer 2026), and supplement it with survey findings from the application of the FHS to 4,000 households across seven states (in collaboration with PwC).
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