Why opening accounts is the easy part — and how the next decade of inclusion must be measured in usage, credit flow and household resilience.
India's first inclusion decade was won at the account-opening counter. Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and UPI together created the largest financial onboarding event in human history. The next decade will be won, or lost, somewhere else — at the point of usage.
A dormant account is not inclusion. A loan that never reaches the woman entrepreneur is not credit. A government transfer that sits in a wallet until it is withdrawn in full is not a financial relationship. Use, not access, is the right yardstick now.
From the field, three shifts are visible. First, credit must move from group-based microcredit to individual enterprise capital with structured advisory. Second, digital rails must be designed for the low-trust, low-literacy edge case — not just the median user. Third, measurement must shift from accounts opened to household-level financial resilience.
If we can do this, the second inclusion decade will not need a name. It will simply look like normal economic life — for women shopkeepers in Tehri, FPO members in Chamoli, and the millions of households for whom the first decade promised so much.