Financial Inclusion in India: An Empirical Study of Unorganized Sector in Gujarat

Abstract

The Indian economy being one of the emerging economies among the twenty global traders with annual growth rate projected at 7.4% for the year 2014-15 as compared to 6.9% growth in the fiscal year 2013-14. With second largest population in world and third largest purchasing power parity India suffers from socio cultural issues such as poverty and unemployment. The major question here is on sustainable growth of the nation. An easy and affordable access to financial and banking services accounts for the financial inclusion particularly for the lower and vulnerable sections of the society. More the people earn more they invest and save more. In order to address the sate of inequality it is essential to give major priority for achieving 100 per cent or near to 100% Financial Inclusion. Gujarat being a rapidly growing state contributing 10% to India’s GDP despite efficient growth it lags behind in Financial Inclusion .The paper on Financial Inclusion in India: An empirical study of unorganized sector aims to do an in depth research in order to reason out for the unaccounted un-organized sector of the state. Unorganized sector refers to the people who drive their economic activities on daily basis by unregistered business firms or self employment. Dealing with primary data on Different parameters of Financial Inclusion pertaining to unorganized sector of Gujarat state and a regression model namely Logit Model is estimated to examine the relationship of Financial Inclusion parameter on various determining variables. Research work is on-going; we expect that Gujarat government has to focus on more spread of awareness among people of Gujarat who are not able to avail economic growth benefits equally despite an excellent performance in HDI, per capita GNI and other economic development parameters.