Attention Economy


Saturday, March 13, 2021

Will Digitalization Boost Financial Access in India?

In about a decade, India has built digital infrastructure to improve services for hundreds of millions by way of biometric IDs and mobile phones.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-13/india-uses-digital-banking-and-biometrics-to-organize-its-1-3-billion-population
While it began with the Manmohan Singh government, Aadhaar became the backbone of the India’s public digital infrastructure in 2014 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi combined it with his government’s Jan Dhan initiative, a financial inclusion program for India’s huge number of unbanked households. These new accounts were linked to both mobile numbers and Aadhaar, creating the Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile, or JAM. Today more than 80% of all Indians have a bank account, up from half that level when the program started”.