SHADES OF GREY

NEW DELHI: The Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana ( PMJDY ) was one of the first flagship initiatives undertaken by the Narendra Modi government after it came to power. Targeting financial inclusion , PM Modi in his first Independence Day speech in 2014 had said, "Today there are crores of families which have mobile phones but no bank accounts. We have to change this. The economic development must benefit poor and it should start from here".While the recent World Bank report is a shot in the arm for PMJDY, there is more to the story.The World Bank in its Global Findex Database, released on April 19, reveals that the country's adult population with a bank account has more than doubled to 80 per cent since 2011. The contribution of Jan Dhan Yojana in this development can be gauged by the fact that while the percentage of adult account holders in India rose from 36 per cent in 2011 to 54 per cent in 2014, it gained pace after the launch of PMJDY. In fact, India's performance in this regard is better than the global numbers which stands at 69 per cent, according to the World Bank data.The government may also brag of 'financial inclusion' as the gender gap in account holders has also been mitigated considerably. In India three years ago, men were 20 percentage points more likely than women to have an account. "Today, India's gender gap has shrunk to 6 percentage points thanks to a strong government push to increase account ownership through biometric identification cards," the report said.As enticing as the broader numbers may seem, the achievement of Jan Dhan Yojana does not have a clean slate to show. The World Bank report says that at 19 crore adults, India is second only to China in terms of number of adults without a bank account. The bank said China and India, despite having relatively high account ownership, claim large shares of the global unbanked population because of their sheer size. An even alarming observation made by the World Bank is that almost half of the bank accounts remained inactive in the past year.Data from the official website of PMJDY shows that as of December 28, 2016, a sizeable 24.13 per cent of the accounts opened under the scheme are zero balance accounts (ZBA). The number however, is a sharp decline of ZBAs from 76.81 per cent on September 30,2014. Surprisingly though, the government has not updated the data on ZBAs since December 2016.Even for the accounts which have been operated at some point of time, the money deposited in them is not an encouraging amount. The latest data (April 18,2018) on the PMJDY website shows that a total of Rs 81,002.64 crore has been deposited under the scheme in a little over 31.4 crore accounts, which pegs the average deposit amount at Rs 2,580.(With PTI inputs)