For a country like India, with 850 million people liv- ing on less than $2 (Rs. 97) per day, the issue of ensuring inclusive growth is of great significance. Foreseeing the need for a structural change, Muhammad Yunus, a notable economist, popularized the concept of microfinance, and the world today beholds a Grameen Bank, serving over 7.34 million people with a recovery rate of 98.35%. Microfinance refers to the provision of financial services to low-income groups, including the self-employed. Broadly speaking, it refers to a movement that envisions a world in which as many poor and near-poor households as possible have permanent access to an appropriate range of high quality financial services, including not just credit, but also other financial services, such as savings, insurance, fund transfer, remittances, etc.

Most of the poor people are deprived of access to basic financial services, and increasing their access to these services, particularly credit, has been the prime responsibility of all the states since the early years of the country's independence. One of the major steps in this direction was the review of the cooperative structure undertaken in the mid-1950s following the report of the All India Rural Credit Survey, which suggested that the state should partner the cooperatives. The decade of the 1960s also continued to focus on institutional credit sources including cooperatives. The decade of the 1970s was marked by directed lending following the nationalization of banks in 1969 and the introduction of the lead bank scheme. Since the early 1990s, there have been many significant state initiatives in the institutional and policy spheres to facilitate access to financial services by more poverty-stricken groups.

Professional Banker Magazine, Global Banking, Financial Services, Fund Transfer, All India Rural Credit Survey, Reserve Bank of India, National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development, NABARD, Economic Development, Microfinance Institutions, MFIs, Commercial Banks, Integrated Rural Development Project, IRDP, Equity Markets.