Mrs Sonia Gandhi addressed a massive public meeting at Trichy recently, and the key message in her speech was her commitment and that of the Congress towards inclusive growth. The idea of inclusion is possibly the single-most important concept in our democracy today.
Inclusion is a noun that can be prefixed with a variety of adjectives. We can have financial inclusion, educational inclusion, knowledge inclusion, gender inclusion and, of course, political inclusion. Yet, do recall what Jawaharlal Nehru said in his remarkable, iconic and never-to-be-forgotten “Tryst with destiny” speech on the midnight of August 15, 1947: “Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this one world that can no longer be split into isolated fragments”.
Inclusion too is one of those indivisible phenomena. No one type of inclusion can be seen in isolation. Social inclusion inevitably leads to political inclusion. Political inclusion leads to economic inclusion. Economic inclusion leads to financial inclusion. The challenge before us is simple: how soon and how quickly can we expand the “inclusion” universe?
Making India’s economic growth all-encompassing, accessible to the greater populace and to that degree inclusive is one of the major achievements of the UPA government. I would go to the extent of arguing that by hammering away at such egalitarian ideas, by promoting them in speeches, policies, meetings, conferences, in Parliament and outside, in government and in civil society, Dr Manmohan Singh, Mrs Sonia Gandhi and the UPA have made economic and financial inclusion an irreversible and ineffaceable part of Indian public discourse.
Nothing reflects this better than the flagship programme of the UPA government, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). To my mind, there is no greater manifestation of financial inclusion and no greater avenue of social justice and reconciliation.
We live in an unusually dynamic country. In today’s India, wealth is being created at a scorching pace. The number of dollar-denominated millionaires has gone up by 50 per cent in the past year. Yet there is also acute poverty in this country. This is the country that has 670 million mobile phone connections and, as per even the most optimistic estimates, only 400 million personal bank accounts. Indeed, less than 100 million Indians — under 10 per cent of the population — have PAN cards. These people have names, not identities. They have no ID numbers; they are not treated as human beings as much as statistics.
Programmes like NREGA and Aadhar, the Unique Identification Number project, are designed to give such people an identity, a marker that they exist and that their contribution to the national economy is appreciated. Above all, they are designed to give them work and a wage that allows them the right to be seen as equal citizens — the right of financial inclusion.
We must remember that in all of rural India there are only 32,000 bank branches. Just five per cent of India’s 650,000 villages have bank branches. People in rural India get no phone calls from gushing, excited call centres girls and boys; they don’t have bank officers chasing them. Rather, they thirst for a bank to arrive and to get their tired, feeble hands on a passbook.
In his Budget speech in Parliament in February 2010, the finance minister committed to taking banking services to 73,000 villages, each with a population of at least 2,000, by March 2012. Even so, financial inclusion should not be de-contextualised and should not be regarded as limited to the ability to open a bank account, get a PAN number or invest in financial instruments. Economic inclusion is the mother from which both social inclusion and financial inclusion draw their strength. This can take many forms and has diverse implications.
For example, one of the key issues exercising policymakers, business leaders and ordinary citizens alike is the issue of land acquisition and purchase for industrial and infrastructure purposes. Does our responsibility towards the farmer and the small peasant end at giving him one-time compensation for his land and telling him to walk into the wilderness? Is the dimension of economic and financial inclusion not better served in making him a long term partner, some sort of equity holder, in the wealth that will be created from his land?
This is one of the key challenges in the path of inclusive growth. It holds a mirror to all our questions and conundrums related to social, economic and financial inclusion.
Where do the solutions lie? Certainly they don’t lie exclusively in the domain of the state and with the government. India has a growing and increasingly prosperous private sector. Whether by way of business extension or by means of corporate social responsibility, Indian business has to complement the government’s efforts at boosting financial and other forms of inclusion.
Civil society too has to play a role. The role of non-governmental organisations in incubating self-help groups (SHGs) and community-based organisations (CBOs) is well known.
In turn, these organisations encourage members to pool resources and open bank accounts or set up a small seed capital for tiny, self-owned businesses, even a shop or a agro-based based business. SHGs and CBOs are invaluable tools for financial inclusion, particularly for empowering women.
There are hundreds of millions of little people who make up our enthralling, enchanting society. Their stories are stories that, I would imagine, tell us more about India’s economic progress than which billionaire has bought which private plane. This is where the saga of tomorrow’s India is being drafted. This is where the nuts and bolts of financial, economic and social inclusion are being forged.
Consider the canvas. Can one think of anything more magical than an activity that fulfils an economic need, furthers a socially useful idea, creates employment, empowers women and yet promotes financial inclusion?
We must strive to optimise this golden mix, each one of us and do what we can do.

Jayanthi Natarajan is a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha and AICC spokesperson. The views expressed in this
column are her own.