Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion

Drawing on economics and geography, our research project focused on the study of spatial dimensions of financial inclusion process in India. We explored this issue by considering two levels of analysis: the national level and the district level.At the national level, we extracted data from the Reserve Bank of India and built an Index of Financial Inclusion (IFI) with the last updated data at our disposal (March 2013 which have been received only at the end of October 2014). From a cartographic analysis, we propose several hypotheses for future investigations.At the district level, during our first fieldwork in Dharmapuri district (Tamil Nadu, India), we conducted interviews with lead bank managers for the Dharmapuri district, regional bank managers, field-level executives of banks, NGOs directors, business correspondents, clients, and local officials. Based on the discussions with these officials, we decided to focus our attention on Business Correspondents and to prepare a questionnaire. Our survey was conducted between February and April 2014 among 143 Business Correspondents in Trichy district. We present the preliminary results of this survey.