Facilitating financial inclusion through E-Governance: Case based study in Indian scenario

With the mandates of Millennium development goals followed by sustainable development goals, the United Nations have argued in favour of eradicating poverty and achieving economic growth with equitable access to resources. Financial inclusion that aims at extending financial and related services to all citizens is considered an important contributor to development. It is argued that financial inclusion, as a strategy, would encourage citizens to enhance their activity portfolios and would encourage savings, empower women, facilitate remittance, boost production and consumption. E-Governance services are aimed at interventions with the primary purpose of enhancing citizen engagements on line, creating enabling conditions for interactions. Focus of E-Governance services is also on empowering citizens with the scope to reduce information asymmetry, transact on line; establish networks to augment their activities in production, consumption, income, expenditure, access to government services and participation in decision making etc. Therefore, it is important to explore the scope for E-Governance strategies to support financial inclusion services and provide synergy. In India there are considerable efforts to foster financial inclusion and E-Governance (NeGP V.2.0). This paper seeks to explore whether these two efforts have progressed for convergence and assess the present status through a proposed framework and case based study in Indian context.