About 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.

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.

Our primary dataset is extracted from SLBC quarterly booklets — the PDF reports published by State Level Bankers' Committees after each quarterly meeting. These contain district-level data on banking infrastructure, credit, deposits, government schemes, and more.

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