A single political promise made in 2014 — that no Indian household would remain outside the banking system — has, over a decade, quietly rewired how hundreds of millions of Indians save, borrow, and insure themselves. Speaking at an event in Khordha, Odisha on Sunday, 25 October 2026, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman laid out the arithmetic of that transformation in striking detail.

59 crore accounts and counting: the Jan Dhan decade

The centrepiece of the Finance Minister's address was the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY), launched in August 2014 as the first leg of India's JAM trinity — Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, Mobile. Sitharaman cited over 59 crore accounts now active under the scheme, each carrying zero annual charges and no minimum-balance requirement. The political salience is direct benefit transfer: welfare money flows into individual accounts rather than through the multi-layered chains that historically bled it away. No middlemen. No leakages. Straight in.

₹43 lakh crore to 60 crore borrowers — and 65% are women

Formal credit — historically the hardest wall for India's informal economy to breach — has seen its own revolution, the Finance Minister argued. Under the Pradhan Mantri MUDRA Yojana, announced in the 2015 Union Budget to extend collateral-free loans up to ₹10 lakh to micro and small enterprises, cumulative sanctions have crossed ₹43 lakh crore across over 60 crore loan accounts. The detail that lands hardest: more than 65% of beneficiaries are women. Many have cycled through a first loan, repaid it, and graduated to higher credit — the hallmark of a functioning credit ladder rather than a one-time subsidy.

The pattern repeats under PM SVANidhi, the 2020 working-capital scheme for urban street vendors launched as part of the Atmanirbhar Bharat package. Nearly 1.2 crore loans have been disbursed, and vendors too have taken repeat loans to scale up, the Finance Minister said. A cart-pusher graduating to a small stall — that is the micro-story the government is using as proof of concept.

Insurance and pensions: the safety net that costs almost nothing

Sitharaman also highlighted the low-premium social security layer built alongside the credit push. PM Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojana offers life insurance cover; PM Suraksha Bima Yojana (PMSBY) covers accident-related disability and death; and the Atal Pension Yojana (APY), targeted at unorganised-sector workers, provides a defined retirement benefit — all introduced in May 2015 and designed to run at costs that do not price out the very poor. The pitch is that formal financial inclusion is not just a bank account anymore; it is a bundled floor: credit, insurance, and pension, available to someone who, a decade ago, had none of the three.

Why Odisha, why now

Khordha — the district that encompasses Bhubaneswar — sits in a state where the BJP has been consolidating ground after its historic 2024 Odisha assembly win. A Finance Minister personally itemising flagship scheme milestones on the ground is as much political signalling as it is policy communication. The JAM architecture, successive budgets have emphasised, is the infrastructure on which everything from farm subsidies to cooking-gas transfers now runs. Calling out the numbers in public, in a key eastern state, is the government making the case that the plumbing works — and that voters should notice.

The next test will come in the data: RBI and Finance Ministry figures on Jan Dhan account dormancy and MUDRA non-performing assets will tell a fuller story than any single stage address. But the scale of the headline numbers alone — 59 crore bank accounts, ₹43 lakh crore in credit, 1.2 crore vendor loans — frames a decade of financial inclusion as one of independent India's larger administrative undertakings. Whether it has been deep enough is the question the next Economic Survey will have to answer.