Boston Consultancy Group (BCG), along with top industry body CII, has come out with a 15-point agenda on how to convert a Rs 20,000-crore obligation into a real opportunity for banks to realise the government's ambitious financial inclusion programme.
The consultancy firm, in a report titled 'Obligation to Opportunity', said though India is emerging as a major economic force, growth in not broad-based as a majority of the population is excluded from the financial services sector and this needs to be addressed.
India's chances of being a major economic power will be severely jeopardised if growth is not broad-based. We have to include each and every person in the financial sector," BCG Chairman (Asia-Pacific) Janmanjaye Sinha told reporters while releasing the report here today.
According to the report, about half of the Indian households do not have access to products like remittances, savings and credit.
However, it pointed out that there has been an improvement in the current levels of financial inclusion at 47 per cent, from about 35 per cent five years ago.
BCG's agenda, that would help market participants as well as policy-makers to ensure financial inclusion, includes the need to bring down human resource costs per employee, learning to make low-cost distribution partnerships, Aadhar (brand name for unique identification numbers) as a platform and disbursal of the government payments using Aadhar-linked bank accounts, among others. .
"Currently, the government channels Rs 3,00,000 crore as welfare payments. Even a 2-3 per cent spending on this infrastructure can put an end to leakage which is estimated to be more than 30 per cent," Sinha said.
On the need to reduce manpower costs, Sinha said employee costs contribute to more than half of the total operating costs of the banks. Hence, the service providers can reduce the costs per employee from Rs 5.5 lakh to Rs 1 lakh per annum as the local talent pool is available at lower costs.
Banks can leverage new guidelines to lower cost of distribution network by tying up with existing players, the report added.
It said the government's ambitious Aadhar programme can be used for rapid financial inclusion and lower costs as the project plans to roll out 600-million Aadhar numbers in the next four years. "It is an opportunity to reduce customer acquisition costs." 
Other points, the BCG, mentioned in the report, include deployment of efficient and cost-effective technology, creation of targeted product and service offering, dedicated funds for literacy drives and vocational training, setting up of dedicated funds to drive literacy and vocational training programmes, enable rural infrastructure development, creation of FII for monitoring service delivery, amongst others.