Nellore figures in the CRISIL Inclusix Top 50 Districts

SPSR Nellore district is ranked 46 in the CRISIL Inclusix Top 50 districts with a score of 66.6. Only 3 other districts from Andhra Pradesh (Hyderabad, Guntur and Krishna) figure in the list. The state of Andhra Pradesh ranks 6th with a score of 61.3 where as the all India score is just 40.1 .

CRISIL Inclusix is India’s first comprehensive measure of financial inclusion in the form of an index. It is a relative index that has a scale of 0 to 100, and combines three very critical parameters of basic banking services — branch penetration (BP), deposit penetration (DP), and credit penetration (CP) — together into one single metric. For each of these parameters, CRISIL evaluates financial inclusion at the national/ regional/ state/ district level vis-à-vis a defined ideal. A CRISIL Inclusix score of 100 indicates the ideal state for each of the three parameters.

The low all-India CRISIL Inclusix score of 40.1 (on a scale of 100) is a reflection of under-penetration of formal banking facilities in most parts of the country. Just one in two Indians has a savings account, and only one in seven Indians has access to banking credit. In fact, the bottom 50 scoring districts have just 2 per cent of the country’s bank branches.

However it is said that CRISIL has failed to capture the full picture as it is based on just the banking data provided by the Reserve Bank of India. Data from a large network of non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) and micro-finance institutions (MFIs), with over 10,000 branches largely in the rural areas, is missing. It also does not consider products like micro-insurance and micro-pensions.