These significant gains have been achieved even while renewing our goals of social banking viz., maintaining the wide reach of the banking system and directing credit towards important but disadvantaged sectors of society. A brief discussion on the performance of the banking sector under the reform process is given below.
Spread of banking The banking system's wide reach, judged in terms of expansion of branches and the growth of credit and deposits indicates continued financial deepening (Table 1). The population per bank branch has not changed much since the 1980s, and has remained at around 16,000.