Financial Literacy Needs Genuine Efforts

Investor awareness is about statistics. There is a lot of crowing about investor awareness programmes that a regulator like the Securities and Exchange Board of India, a mutual fund or a stock exchange conducts across the length and breadth of India.

- Rajas Kelkar

They claim to do them in local languages with thousands of financial trainers. All that effort has translated into a 27% financial literacy rate, according to a study published in the latest monthly bulletin of the National Stock Exchange. In a country of 140 crore people, a quarter are financially literate. It is no small achievement if you think about absolute numbers. However, it is lower than the global average of 35%.

The survey, which was quoted in the NSE bulletin, was conducted in 2019. The study states that there are significant variations in the financial literacy levels of urban and rural India, glaring disparities in the states and regions, and significant differences between men and women.