The Global Inclusion Finance Summit presented the crust of Indian Microfinance state to propel towards Financial Inclusion
New Delhi, 27th January 2023: Inclusive Finance India Summit – a global convening set up by the ACCESS Development Services, hosted the 19th Inclusive Finance Summit on January 17 & 18, 2023, at Hotel Ashok, New Delhi. The Global summit promoted dialogue and enabled action guided by the goal of advancing financial inclusion in the country.
Inaugurated by S Ramann, Chairman and Managing Director, Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI), said, “Seeing such intellectual passion and capital under one roof is truly wonderful. Aligned with the overarching vision of the IFI summit, SIDBI has launched a Udhyam registration platform where the dualism of MSMEs world will reduce. Our vision is to bring informal micro enterprises in the country into the formal fold and enable them for priority sector lending. As of today, there are 1.4 crore entities in the Udhyam platform.”
N S Vishwanathan, Former Deputy Governor of RBI, launching the annual report, ‘Inclusive Finance India’ said, “ multi-stakeholder approach is needed to build the resilience of the economically vulnerable, and the national strategy has rightly alluded to this. In the MicroFinance Sector, a change happened in the last 2-3 years where banks became a major purveyor of credit to the microfinancing segment as opposed to earlier NBFCs and MFIs, and this was facilitated because of technology use of technology fintechs, use of business correspondence and banks were able to lend to the microfinance segment directly. They continue to be the single largest lender to the microfinance sector, although their share has reduced from 58.4 per cent in 2021 to 56 per cent in 2022. The number of unique clients declined from 63 million in December 2020 to 60 million in March 2021 but went up to 61 million in March 2022.”
The annual report is an in-depth, well-researched, and well-analyzed narration of microfinance models and the banking system drafted by the multi-stakeholders. The report reviews the performance of diverse institutional structures and delivery models in inclusive finance. The research highlights that while the share of outstanding loans of all banks decreased from 58.4%in 2021 to 56% in 2022, that of MFIs increased from 30.6% to 36%.
The Report also suggests that Agritech players need catalytic effort, collaborations and partnerships to build and scale the business model around Green Financing. Additionally, most farmers, especially small-holder farmers, would need financial incentives to shift from existing practices to adopting new technologies for smart irrigation, soil and water conservation, building water ponds, sowing drought-tolerant seeds, and using integrated pest/nutrient management techniques.
The Guest of Honor for the Inclusive Finance India Awards Ceremony was Shri V. Anantha Nageswaran, Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India.
During the event, Anantha Nageshwaran said “We are a large country and inspite of the extremely impressive progress we have achieved in the last several years there is still much to be done for financial inclusion, MSMEs & individuals. Starting from the Prime Minister’s Jan Dhan Yojana Scheme in which there are nearly 48 crore beneficiaries in total, about 26.6 crore happen to be women beneficiaries. There is close to 1.83 lakh crores deposit of Jan dhan yojana account. Innovations such as open credit enabler network, embedded finance, account aggregators all of these are making financing available to those who were excluded from it.”
Inclusive Finance India Awards constantly realigns itself to bring different models and institutions contributing to the goal of financial inclusion under one umbrella. The award categories are aligned continuously to the shift & changes as financial inclusion evolves, with new categories added and sometimes dropped. The prestige of the Inclusive Finance India Awards is also enhanced by the layers of scrutiny and screening to which the nominations are subjected.