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.
This paper studies the changes in balance sheet composition across both extensive and intensive margins during this decade, allowing for heterogenous effects of year and regional banking sector development by household occupation type.
MSME segment is mammoth and has very distinct and crucial subcategories. Responding to this heterogeneity can spur momentum across the entire sector
Our comments to the Draft Guidance on Regulatory Expectations for Data Governance
This report presents a brief synopsis of the methodology and anonymised findings.
The study followed 293 women in rural Rajasthan over 6 months, documenting more than 135,000 financial transactions while introducing assisted access to a UPI-based mobile payments application through community-based women facilitators.
The Draft Guidance proposes broad regulatory expectations for model risk management across the model lifecycle. It intends to strengthen governance, oversight, risk management and controls of Regulated Entities (REs) using models (including AI / ML models). In this response we present our comments to the Draft Guidance, through six recommendations
This paper provides a conceptual framework for citizen- centricity, breaking it down into system- level design features. It provides case studies of three SP- DPIs in the Indian context, and surfaces crucial learnings about their design.
As algorithmic systems increasingly shape financial decisions, this blog explores how they can de-humanize individuals by reducing them to data points.
India’s financial inclusion story over the last decade has been remarkable, with dramatic expansion in account ownership and sustained growth in credit. Yet, evidence increasingly points towards a gap between access and impact as witnessed in high rates of dormant accounts and the ongoing NPA crisis in the microfinance industry.
In all our research efforts, we strive to maintain an independent voice that speaks for the low-income household and household enterprises. Our ability to perform this function is significantly enhanced by our commitment to disseminate as a pure public good, all the intellectual capital that we create.
