India's Co-operative Banks on the Route to Financial Inclusion

Financial inclusion has increasingly attracted attention of the global community in recent years. The importance of financial inclusion can be explained in terms of maximizing the proportion of population covered by the formal financial sector, to enable the chanelling of funds for productive investment, controlling inflationary tendencies, and monitoring and widening the tax base among other things. This paper looks at the role of the cooperative banking system in promoting financial inclusion. It discusses the genesis of the credit cooperatives supported by the district central cooperative banks (DCCBs) in enabling the provision of financial services to low income families. These institutions are currently the subject of reform programmes intended to make them more efficient and effective as providers of financial services if not necessarily as promoters of inclusion