FINER.

About Project FINER

An open data platform mapping financial inclusion across India — district by district.

What is Project FINER

Project FINER (Financial Inclusion in the North East Region) started as an effort to make sense of the dense quarterly PDF booklets published by State Level Bankers' Committees (SLBCs) — the only source of district-level banking data in India.

What began with 8 North Eastern states has grown into a platform covering 22 states and 540+ districts, with interactive maps, time-series analysis, and downloadable machine-readable datasets that didn't exist before in any usable format.

The Problem

India's financial inclusion data is scattered across dozens of agencies — RBI, NABARD, NPCI, UIDAI, individual state SLBCs — each publishing in different formats, at different granularities, on different schedules. Most of it is locked in PDFs.

Researchers, policymakers, and journalists who need district-level answers — which districts have the lowest credit-deposit ratios? where is KCC penetration weakest? how has Jan Dhan enrollment changed over time? — face weeks of manual data extraction before analysis can even begin.

What We Do

Extract

We parse hundreds of SLBC PDF booklets — handling OCR artifacts, reversed text, inconsistent formatting — and convert them into clean, structured datasets.

Map

Every data point is placed on an interactive map — from district-level CD ratios and branch counts to 260,000+ capital market access points across India.

Open

All data is freely downloadable as CSV and Excel. No paywalls, no registration. Built for researchers, journalists, policymakers, and anyone who cares about financial inclusion.

Coverage
22
States covered
540+
Districts mapped
48+
Indicator categories
260K+
Capital market access points
North East Region

Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Tripura, Nagaland, Sikkim

East & Central India

Bihar, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh

South India

Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Telangana

West & North India

Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana, Uttarakhand

Data Sources & Attributions

Project FINER aggregates data from many sources. Several have specific citation requirements; we list them below in the form recommended by the original publishers. If you reuse any of these data, please cite the original sources rather than (or in addition to) Project FINER.

Government & Banking

SLBC quarterly data
State Level Bankers' Committee (SLBC) quarterly meeting agendas, published by lead-bank convenors per state.
Coverage: 22 of 30 SLBC states · Aggregation: District · License: Public information
RBI Banking Outlet Locator
Reserve Bank of India, Database on Indian Economy (DBIE) — Banking Outlet Locator. Comprehensive registry of branches, ATMs, BCs, CSPs, and Digital Banking Units.
Coverage: National · Source: dbie.rbi.org.in
UIDAI district enrolment data
Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) — district-level Aadhaar enrolment counts by date, age group, and pincode for April–December 2025.
Coverage: 985 districts · Source: uidai.gov.in
DAY-NRLM (SHGs)
Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana — National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NRLM), Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India. District-level SHG data.
Coverage: National · Source: nrlm.gov.in
CDSL · NSDL · AMFI
Combined district-level counts from CDSL Depository Participant service centres, NSDL DP service centres, and AMFI Mutual Fund Distributor registries.
Coverage: National · Sources: cdslindia.com · nsdl.co.in · amfiindia.com
PhonePe Pulse
PhonePe Pulse — open data on digital payment transactions through the PhonePe UPI platform.
Coverage: National · Source: phonepe.com/pulse

Health Statistics

NFHS-5 · Health Insurance Coverage
International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) and ICF. 2021. National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), 2019–21: India. Mumbai: IIPS.
Coverage: 637 districts surveyed · Producer: IIPS, ICF, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, GoI · Source: rchiips.org/nfhs

SHRUG-derived (Development Data Lab)

The following datasets are sourced from the Socioeconomic High-resolution Rural-Urban Geographic Platform (SHRUG) v2.1, maintained by Development Data Lab (DDL). All SHRUG datasets are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Per DDL: "Neither DDL nor the contributors of data to DDL shall be held liable for any improper or incorrect use or application of the data provided."

Meta Relative Wealth Index 2021
Chi, Guanghua, Han Fang, Sourav Chatterjee, and Joshua E. Blumenstock. "Microestimates of wealth for all low- and middle-income countries." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119, no. 3 (2022): e2113658119.
Asher, Sam, Tobias Lunt, Ryu Matsuura, and Paul Novosad. "Development research at high geographic resolution: an analysis of night-lights, firms, and poverty in India using the SHRUG open data platform." The World Bank Economic Review 35, no. 4 (2021): 845–871.
Producer: Meta Data for Good · License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Source: data.humdata.org/dataset/relative-wealth-index
VIIRS Annual Nightlights (2012–2023)
Asher, Sam, Tobias Lunt, Ryu Matsuura, and Paul Novosad. "Development research at high geographic resolution: an analysis of night-lights, firms, and poverty in India using the SHRUG open data platform." The World Bank Economic Review 35, no. 4 (2021): 845–871.
Producer: Colorado School of Mines, Earth Observatory Group (NOAA/CSM) · License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Source: eogdata.mines.edu/products/vnl
PMGSY Rural Roads (cumulative through 2015)
Asher, Sam, and Paul Novosad. "Rural Roads and Local Economic Development." American Economic Review 110, no. 3 (2020): 797–823.
Producer: National Rural Roads Development Authority (NRRDA), Ministry of Rural Development · License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Source: omms.nic.in
Open Source

Project FINER is open source. The code, extraction scripts, and all processed datasets are available on GitHub.

View on GitHub
Get in Touch

Have questions, corrections, or want to collaborate? Email us at mail@projectfiner.com or open an issue on GitHub.