India has leapfrogged over the last decade, and other countries can learn from the financial inclusion model and move much faster, said Dinesh Kumar Khara, SBI Chairman, on Thursday.
“If you look at it in our country, I think it’s a lesson for all of the globe on how the payment system could be so efficient, cheap and economical,” Khara said in an exclusive interview with ET on the sidelines of B20 Summit organized by CII in New Delhi.
Khara noted that if Jan Dhan had been a pure vanilla account, people would not have shown so much interest in the scheme and it is the addition of services which has given it nuance.
“Now it has gone beyond. People are getting their direct benefit transfers; they are also availing the insurance benefits and contributing towards social security,” he noted, lauding the success of the Jan Dhan scheme.
The SBI chairman, who was also head of the B20 India Task Force on Financial Inclusion for Economic Empowerment, said that “Rs 10 trillion worth of savings have been channelized in this economy (India), which gives confidence among others that this is worth pursuing.”
He, however, pointed out that the task would require social and digital maturity on part of the economies to implement these measures.
“The gender gap seen across the globe can be bridged from what we have seen here,” Khara said, highlighting that financial inclusion push achieved through self-help groups.
The Prime Minister, in his Independence Day speech, had also lauded the efforts made by women self-help groups and set the target for creating two crore lakhpati didis through women’s self-help groups.
Furthermore, the SBI chairman said that the push towards financing of MSMEs via government sponsored schemes like MUDRA and SVANidhi Yojana were also lessons in democratisation of credit that other countries could draw.
The learnings from India could also be instrumental in driving growth.
“It took us 54 years to reach the first $1trillion. But now, every seven years, we have grown by about another trillion. All this is because these are the incremental improvements that have happened in the ecosystem,” Khara said.
The B20 taskforce headed by Khara has recommended setting up a B20 financial inclusion framework and has suggested policy recommendations on 11 key themes, which include inclusive finance, agriculture and rural support, enhancing consumer protection and incentivising cross-border payments.
