Recent cases of malpractice have been reported regarding Jan Dhan accounts. In this context, it may be interesting to know the challenges at the local level that impact financial inclusion. In India, where almost a quarter of the population is illiterate and below the poverty line, ensuring financial inclusion is a challenge. Both indicators, poverty and illiteracy, vary considerably across Indian states. Rural poverty exceeds 30 percent of the population in places like Assam, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Orissa, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Manipur. Rural poverty can be attributed to declining agricultural income, lack of sustainable livelihoods, lack of skills, underemployment and unemployment. Thus, ensuring deposit operations in these accounts is a challenge. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essayIndia has a literacy rate of 73%, some states like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan where the literacy rate is 73%. varies between 62 percent and 70 percent. Banks have found ways to address illiteracy-related limitations by ensuring biometric access to bank accounts. However, Aadhaar priming means that certain numbers still need to be entered into the machine to manage an account. As all the numbers are in English, only the banker or business correspondent (BC) can enter the Aadhaar number. Similarly, messages received from banks on mobile phones are also in English and hence the illiterate person has to seek help from someone to understand and interpret the message. In each of the above cases, the confidentiality of an individual's bank balance is violated. This makes the illiterate and housebound population – women and the elderly – vulnerable to bad practices. There are also anecdotes that enterprising BCs, to facilitate their business, assign the same personal identification number (PIN) to all residents of the same village. This may further compromise privacy and embarrass authorities when direct benefit transfers via bank accounts are implemented on a larger scale. Therefore, a financial inclusion strategy sensitive to regional, demographic and gender factors needs to be carefully crafted. Furthermore, one must wonder why, despite considerable efforts by the authorities, the Prime Minister's Jan Dhan Accounts (PMJDA) underperformed. This could be due, in addition to poverty and illiteracy, to the type of products offered to the unbanked population. For example, recurring deposits are products more suited to salaried income rather than people in the informal sector whose income is uncertain, seasonal and unplanned. When the PMJDA was opened, it was mainly the public sector banks (PSBs) that seized the opportunity to ensure that every unbanked household had a bank account. Now that 25 million PMJDAs have been opened in the last two years, an unprecedented feat in the history of financial inclusion, one must ask whether it is also the responsibility of PSBs to ensure their functioning. Opening the PMJDA was a mammoth task because in March 2014, just before the PMJDA, the total accounts on the books of commercial banks were around 1 lakh crore. As one can imagine, given the limited resources of the banking sector, the opening of such a large number of PMJDAs in 24 months in remote areas has diverted the attention of bankers from.