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Abstract
Lot of discussion is happening about the role of financial products and markets in improving livability standard of people and real economic activity. In Western nations such as the U.S., debate is on the financial sector becoming inefficiently huge and has been providing complex products to consumers like households and firms, whereas in many emerging and developing nations, there has been a significant push to increase the usage of financial products. Indian banking industry has attained substantial improvements in all the areas relating to financial feasibility, profitability and competitiveness and has depicted growth in branch and ATMs penetration in the last few decades. Despite these success and efforts, banks were not been able to pull the vast segment of the populace especially the underprivileged into the basic banking services. The paper finds out how far the commercial banks are able to overcome the barriers such as the lack of reach, mounting cost of transactions and time taken in providing those services to people with a special focus on select villages from Southern part of India. This paper also studies the key drivers of financial inclusion (FI) by using micro and regional data to understand the crucial factors that could stimulate FI.