Empowering women through digital financial inclusion

Efforts must be made to ensure that technologies eliminate digital gender gap.

Empowering underprivileged people remains key to bringing about financial inclusion. They have been out of the mainstream economy due to lack of financial inclusion and access to the banking system in the digital era. As exemplified by Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi's comment that his government aims to "put our Nari Shakti at the forefront of India's development journey," the Digital Literacy Initiative is expected to enable especially women to have savings accounts, access to credit, insurance and digital payments which are need of the hour. He further added that "these efforts will continue with even greater vigour in the coming times." It will further give opportunities for generating income, improving livelihood, accumulating assets, and participating in economic activities, and household decisionmaking that help in promoting social and economic empowerment.

The mission of Digital India, launched in 2015, is to connect and integrate an unbanked population and bring them into the financial net with use of technology at affordable cost. The launch of JAM Trinity services - Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, and Mobile and the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) - helped lay the groundwork for Digital India. The unique identification process of Aadhaar is linked with the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) scheme, as a result, there has been a significant improvement in terms of accurate payments.

This has been made very easy and people-friendly electronics mode of payments by replacing the dependence on cash-mode payments that has helped in weeding out fake welfare scheme beneficiaries. Today, access to banking and digital transactions is one of the remarkable success stories of India.

However, to realize their full potential, efforts must be made to ensure that these technologies eliminate digital gender gap and build a more inclusive digital world.