The winding road from financial access to financial outcomes
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.
Rethinking financial health for meaningful impact
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.
Reframing Financial Health: From Canary in a Coal Mine to a Thermostat for Action
Our submission in this paper is that impact measurement in financial inclusion, i.e., financial health measurement can, and ought to, play a more diagnostic role in financial inclusion strategy. This is the conceptual departure that the title of the paper describes as the shift ‘from a canary in a coalmine to a thermostat’.
