Journal of Business & Economic Policy

An Assessment of Branch Expansion of Scheduled Commercial Banks in India
S. M. Jawed Akhtar, Saba Parveen

Abstract
Since Independence, the successive governments of India have emphasized the relation between the easy and equitable access to finance and poverty alleviation. The need to improve the financial access for India’s poor and to materialize the relation between accesses to finance and poverty reduction, nationalization of commercial banks in 1969 and branch licensing policies have been undertaken to expand the rural banking in India. This significantly had improved the branch network of the banks and the public sector banks in particular moved into the interiors and previously unbanked locations, but the banking reforms of 1991 reversed the growth of rural banking outreach. In light of this background, this paper makes an attempt to analyze the growth rate of branch expansion of scheduled commercial banks (SCBs) in India during the period of 1980 to 2013 in which the whole time period is divided into two phases i.e. pre-reform phase and post-reform phase. The study finds that there has been a considerable difference in the growth rate of branch expansion of SCBs in the pre and post-reform periods.

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