Three crore accounts to be opened under Jan Dhan in FY25: FM Nirmala Sitharaman

New Delhi: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday said about 3 crore new accounts under PMJDY are likely to be opened during the current financial year.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had launched the government's flagship financial inclusion programme Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) on August 28, 2014.

Under the scheme, the number of bank accounts grew nearly four-fold from 14.72 crore in March 2015, to 53.13 crore as on August 16, 2024.

Total deposits under PMJDY has swollen from Rs 15,670 crore as of March 2015, to over Rs 2.31 lakh crore as of August 2024.

Talking to reporters on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the launch, Sitharaman said, "Our target is to open more than 3 crore PMJDY accounts during the current financial year."

As on August 14, 2024, there were more than 173 crore operative CASA accounts in the country, including over 53 crore operative PMJDY accounts.

A large number of normal saving bank accounts are also opened by banks. New measures like e-KYC and video KYC have made the account opening process paper-less, eliminating the need to visit a branch or banking correspondent for opening of bank account.

"We believe that most of the adults in the country have been covered with bank accounts and our focus is to cover leftover adults and neo-adults," Sitharaman added.

The average balance in PMJDY accounts has increased from Rs 1,065 in March 2015 to Rs 4,352 as on August 16 this year. Around 80 per cent of accounts are operative.

PMJDY is one of the biggest financial inclusion initiatives in the world under which the total number of accounts opened crossed 53 crore.

The JAM Trinity (Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, Mobile) has given a boost to the DBT programme and expanded its coverage from partial to ubiquitous, the finance ministry said, and added the PMJDY scheme has done very good in rural/semi-urban areas of the country.

Of the total accounts opened under the scheme about 66.6 per cent accounts are opened in rural and semi-urban areas. Of the total 53.13 crore PMJDY accounts, 29.56 crore (55.6 per cent) belong to women account holders.

Today, 99.95 per cent of all inhabited villages have access to banking facilities within a 5-km radius through banking touch points (including bank branches, ATMs, banking correspondents (BCs), and Indian Post Payment Banks), the ministry said.

One of the major key feature of the PMJDY is that there are no account opening charges, no account maintenance charges, and no minimum balance charges.

Also, free RuPay debit card, with in-built accident insurance cover of Rs 2 lakh, and access to overdraft facility of up to Rs 10,000, are other major features of the scheme.

The underlying pillars of PMJDY namely, banking the unbanked, securing the unsecured and funding the unfunded -- has made it possible to adopt a multi-stakeholders collaborative approach while leveraging technology for serving the unserved and underserved areas as well.

The JAM (Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile) pipeline created through account holders' consent-based linking of bank accounts with Aadhaar and mobile numbers of the account holders, which is one of the important pillars of the financial inclusion ecosystem, has enabled instant DBT under various government welfare schemes to the eligible beneficiaries.

The advantage of the architecture created under the Financial Inclusion ecosystem came handy during the Covid-19 pandemic when it facilitated direct income support to farmers under PM-KISAN and transfer of ex-gratia payment to women PMJDY account holders under PM Garib Kalyan package in a seamless and time-bound manner.