India has made remarkable progress in getting women into the banking system. In 2014, the gender gap in bank account ownership was 20 percentage points. The Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, launched in 2014, addressed this problem. As on August 12 2026, close to 590 million people were enrolled in the scheme, over 56% of them were women. According to a February 2025 article in Data for India, even among the poorest 20% of the population, 89% of women had a bank account by 2023, compared to 94% of men. This is definitely a success story. But a next-order challenge needs to be solved. India’s challenge today is no longer access to banking, but whether women actually have agency over the money in their accounts.
Having an account and actually using it are two very different things.India has had remarkable success in addressing the first problem, but the second remains a work in progress. Across the country, one in three bank accounts belongs to a woman, but women only hold about a fifth of the total money deposited in banks, according to an Observer Research Foundation paper. The gap is even more stark when you look at inactive accounts. India has the largest gender gap in account inactivity of any country in the world, at 12 percentage points, and around a third of women’s accounts are inactive.
One reason financial inclusion is critical is that it provides loans to finance personal and professional needs. A NITI Aayog report in April 2026 said women account for almost 26% of formal credit. While the trend shows improvement—the report notes that “women borrowers are progressively moving beyond entry-level credit towards retail and business-purpose lending”—there is still much to be achieved.
This difference matters because it changes what the real problem is. It would be easy to assume that women do not know how to use their accounts or apply for loans, and that the fix is just more awareness. But the data does not really support that. However, assuming women simply know how to use their accounts oversimplifies the problem.
{{/usCountry}}This difference matters because it changes what the real problem is. It would be easy to assume that women do not know how to use their accounts or apply for loans, and that the fix is just more awareness. But the data does not really support that. However, assuming women simply know how to use their accounts oversimplifies the problem.
{{/usCountry}}Historical gender gaps in financial inclusion, digital literacy, and personal phone ownership significantly hinder women’s ability to navigate financial tools, as highlighted in this news report on a policy brief, which notes that only 25.5% of women can conduct online banking compared to 47.1% of men. Even when women possess these technical skills, persistent structural barriers leave them lacking the agency or opportunity to utilise their deposits or access credit.
To understand why this gap persists, it is useful to separate the barriers into two categories. The National Family and Health Survey (NFHS) offers good insight into this problem.
The first is economic. Only 32% of married women are employed, and of those, 15 % are not paid at all for their work. So, many women do not have independent income to begin with. On top of that, only 42% of women own a house and 32% own land, compared with 60% and 42% of men. Since banks often require collateral for anything beyond a small loan, the lack of property ownership helps explain why women’s loans tend to remain small. The second barrier is about agency, not money, and is harder to fix.
Among women who earn an income, only 18% get to decide how to spend it on their own. 67% say they decide jointly with their husbands.
Lack of agency for women is not confined to just matters of work or financial autonomy. The NFHS-5 2019-2021 report suggests that it is also seen in other things, ranging from mobile phone use to mobility and even domestic violence. Mobile phone ownership shows something similar. Only 54% of women own a phone, and that drops to 47% in rural areas. This limits access to digital banking, not because women cannot use a phone, but because the phone itself is usually controlled by men in the household. Attitudes toward wife-beating point to the same underlying issue: 45% of women and 44% of men still agree with at least one reason that justifies it.
All of this suggests that financial inclusion in India has reached the point where policy has already picked the low-hanging fruit and further advances require something beyond it. Opening accounts and giving out small loans solve a logistical problem, and India has solved it well. What remains is a deeper problem: whether women, once they have access to the financial system, can leverage it to achieve upward mobility for themselves, their firms, or their households.
That is not something a bank account can fix on its own, since it comes from inside the household, not from the banking system. Closing that gap requires a change in social norms and a shift in social beliefs, not just getting more access. True financial inclusion should ultimately be measured by women’s ability to exercise economic agency, not just by how many accounts exist in their names.
Aanandi Chawla is a grade 12 student at UWCSEA East in Singapore. She interned with the Hindustan Times data journalism team between July-August 2026. This article is based on her work during the internship.