ARE YOU FINANCIALLY INCLUDED?

I have been working on a 'Financial Inclusion' project for the past 2 to 3 months. Our paper has been accepted and me and my team-mate have been invited to speak at the 3rd National Conference on Finance and Economics at ICFAI Business School Bangalore.

I have learnt a lot working on this project.Coming from 2 years sales experience in financial services, that to which were targetted to the lower segment of the society I have seen how they get exploited. But I have also seen how profitable they are and how much they pay their loans on time as compared to their richer counterparts.

Financial Inclusion is making available the entire gamut of financial tools available to all sections of society especially the underprivileged at an affordable cost.Have you ever thought how much you really know about your finances? Now don't think that hey I'm from marketing or some other stream and that finance is such a dry boring topic.It is the duty of those in the financial world too make available all kinds of information to everyone simply and at an affordable price. If you use your bank account just to deposit and withdraw money. You too suffer from financial exclusion. Infact there are many wealthy people who just don't know what to do with their money.Think about it do you know what else to do, who to talk to, what investments are available etc. This situation is highly prevalent in developed countries. In India it is more severe with people not even having a bank account ( no big surprise!)

You may think what do I care if my neighbour does not have a bank account.But lets join the dots (as my economics professor might say) a farmer is commiting suicide in Punjab because he does not have funds........that was your foodgrains he was growing.Now there will be that much less not only that........the urban market is getting saturated companies are looking to rural areas but where do the people in rural areas get funds to buy the products?They don't have the money, they don't have a bank account they don't have acess to information on how they can generate that money. Where does that leave you and me? With a short supply of food grains and a market filled with products that we don't need.There are various different ways of looking at it all with probably a worse outcome then this.So let social responsibilty fly out the window.It usually does not generate much interest if you say that financial institutions or governments need to do it to fulfil their social responsibility.Do it if you want to make a profit,wake up and smell the coffee India this section is bankable. Not only that it constitutes 70% of your marketplace since 70% of the people in India live in villages.If our country needs to develop everyone needs to get financially included PERIOD

There are many organisations that we have studied like Grameen bank http://www.grameen-info.org/, SKS http://www.sksindia.com/index.htm Shrujan http://www.shrujan.org/ just to name a few that are doing good work in the field of microfinance. Financial Inclusion is like an umbrella term that includes everything including microfinance, microinsurance etc. It's the government that needs to get their act together and create dynamic and flexible policies as well as provide the requisite infrastructure to these organizations so that they carry out their job better.As youth of India we are all stakeholders in its future and the oft quoted statement by CK Prahlad holds good here as well 'The future lies at the bottom of the pyramid." Think about it.