Women’s financial inclusion in India and south Asia: a trend analysis using Global Findex data, 2011–2024

Abstract

The authors in this chapter explore how the financial inclusion of women in India has evolved structurally and behaviourally from 2011 to 2024, and benchmark India in the South Asian region. The research uses a multi-dimensional analytical framework and the World Bank Global Findex Database as a key quantitative tool to assess seven important indicators on access, usage, and administrative barriers. The findings reveal a substantial expansion in women’s financial access in India, with account ownership increasing from 26.5% in 2011 to 89.2% in 2024. This remarkable progress has significantly narrowed the gender gap in basic financial access and positioned India as a leading performer within the South Asian region. Despite these gains in access, the findings highlight a persistent Access–Usage Paradox, wherein increased account ownership has not translated into equivalent levels of active financial participation. The analysis identifies notable gaps in account usage, digital payment adoption, and engagement with formal financial services. This includes a 17.5% inactivity rate and an 11.48% gender gap in digital payment adoption. The study introduces the concept of “administrative exclusion” to explain the transition from account-opening barriers to account-maintenance barriers within the financial inclusion ecosystem. The study focuses specifically on how rigid e-KYC processes and vulnerabilities to biometrics have become a weapon against rural women, and the rates of account freezes are as high as 60–75% in the surveyed clusters. The chapter takes Amartya Sen's Capabilities Approach perspective to argue that financial inclusion should be reframed as an agency problem rather than merely a baseline of infrastructure. The results show that the use of advanced fintech services is far behind, as is formal access to credit, indicating that the goals of enhancing credit access are not as well achieved as those of advancing the use of advanced fintech. Finally, this chapter presents strategic policy options such as tiered KYC models, gender-intentional credit scoring based on transaction histories rather than collateral, and the scaling up of human-centric intermediation through the “Sakhis” model, per the authors. The study contributes to the literature by demonstrating the importance of moving from the “onboarding barrier” to the “maintenance crisis” and by situating women's ownership of small businesses within the context of economic agency.