New Delhi: The Union government said on Tuesday (December 19) that 20% of the bank accounts opened under the Jan Dhan Yojana in the country are inoperative.Responding to a question posed in the Rajya Sabha by Rashtriya Lok Dal Party MP Jayant Chaudhary, Union minister of state for finance Bhagwat Karad said, “…out of approximately 51.11 crore PMJDY accounts,around 20% accounts are inoperative as on 06.12.2023.”Explaining what constitutes an inoperative account, Karad continued, “As per Reserve Bank of India guidelines, a savings as well as current account should be treated as inoperative/ dormant, if there are no customer induced transactions in the account for over a period of two years. The reasons for the account turning inoperative can be many and it has no direct co-relation to the account-holder being untraceable. Further, the customers at any point of time can make a request for activation of inoperative account without being charged. The banks make these accounts operative after performing necessary Know Your Customer (KYC).”A little less than half of the inoperative accounts belong to women, the minister said: “As on 06.12.2023, out of the total 10.34 crore inoperative PMJDY accounts, 4.93 crore accounts belong to women. The deposited balance in the inoperative PMJDY accounts is around Rs.12,779 crore which is around 6.12% of the total deposited balance in PMJDY accounts. This balance continues to earn interest at par with that applicable to the operative accounts and can be claimed and withdrawn by the depositors at any point of time after the account becomes operative again.”Chaudhary claimed that banks have been making an effort to reduce the percentage of inoperative accounts, including through awareness campaigns, and so the percentage of inoperative accounts has come down from 40% in March 2017 to 20% in November 2023.The Jan Dhan Yojana, a pet project of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s in his first term, was launched in 2014 and pushed the idea of financial inclusion through opening zero-balance accounts. However, multiple reports in the aftermath of this push revealed that simply opening an account did not mean people would use them.
