While the initial impact of these initiatives has been positive, it has created a huge potential for expansion in banking business once the level of activity is scaled up and government social benefit transfers increasingly take place through the banking sector. While we have our own data source to gauge financial inclusion, the Census of India provides useful information on access to banking.
It shows that about 59 per cent of households had access to banking services in 2011 as compared with only 35 per cent in 2001. Increase in access for the eastern-region has also gone up significantly from about 29 per cent in 2001 to 47 per cent in 2011, though the region still lags behind the all-India average (Table 3).