Bank Branches & Banking Access

Bank nationalisation in 1969 and 1980 was driven by branch expansion — banks were required to open offices in unbanked areas, and the rural network grew from a few thousand to tens of thousands. Growth then slowed for two decades. The next push came with Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana in August 2014, which mapped every village into about 1.59 lakh Sub-Service Areas of 1,000 to 1,500 households each and required that every one of them have a banking access point. Branches alone could not do that: 0.33 lakh Sub-Service Areas were covered by a branch and 1.26 lakh by an interoperable business correspondent — a local agent with a handheld device, which is how most of rural India now banks.

As of March 2026, 99.92% of India's villages have a banking outlet — a branch, a business correspondent or an India Post Payments Bank counter — within five kilometres. Of the 5.53 lakh villages mapped on the Jan Dhan Darshak app, 5.52 lakh have a branch or business correspondent within that distance. The app exists precisely to find the gaps: banks use it to identify villages with no banking touchpoint inside a 5 km radius and to site the next outlet there.

Access is delivered in four layers. Branches — 1.66 lakh of them, about 1 lakh in rural and semi-urban areas — do the full range of banking. Business correspondents, 4.35 lakh, carry a device to the village and handle deposits, withdrawals and Aadhaar-based payments where a branch would never be viable. ATMs, 2.07 lakh, cover cash. India Post Payments Bank uses the existing postal network — over 1.65 lakh post offices, more than 12 crore customers across 5.57 lakh villages and towns — turning the postman into a banking channel. RBI tracks the combined result through its Financial Inclusion Index, a composite of 97 indicators across access, usage and quality.

RBI's Financial Inclusion Index reached 67.0 for March 2025, up from 53.9 when the index began in March 2021 — a rise of 24.3%, with RBI attributing the latest gain to the usage and quality dimensions rather than access, which suggests the network is now broad enough that the work has shifted to getting it used well. The World Bank's Global Findex 2025 puts account ownership in India at 89%. What the branch count does not show is how much of the growth has moved off the branch network entirely: business correspondents outnumber branches roughly two and a half to one, and a village counted as covered may be served by an agent with a tablet rather than a building.