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Economic development is possible only if a significant share of the population develops a culture of savings. This culture is conceivable through financial inclusion, which widens the resource base of the financial system, thus, bringing in the marginalised and low-income sections within the purview of the formal banking sector. The inclusion of the marginalised section of society helps in shielding the financial wealth and various other resources in exigent situations. The study captures the discernible trends and practices present in an emerging country like India. Moreover, financial inclusions reduce the scope of exploitation of the weaker sections of the society by providing secure and easy access to formal credit. Hence, in this study, we have considered the case of India for understanding the role of financial inclusion in economic development. The Indian government aims at providing easy access to finance for those who have remained from the reaches of banking and financial systems through the policy of Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojna. Under this policy, the government-owned public-sector banks have given many incentives to the marginalised sections so that they do not feel burdened by the rules and regulations of the regular banking system. The primary objective of this article is to critically review the policy as a programme with a focus of financial inclusion of the under-served population.

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To prevent the pandemic spread of human-to-human transmitted diseases such as COVID-19, governments commonly resort to countrywide or regional lockdown strategies. Such lockdowns, whenever and wherever implemented, curtail the movement of persons and vehicles, and drastically alter traffic conditions. This study focuses on the effect of drastic and sudden changes in the traffic conditions, during the COVID-19 lockdown in the State of Maharashtra in India, in March–June 2020, on the numbers of motor vehicle accidents (MVAs), and the resultant fatalities and injuries. Content analysis of police-reported first information reports (FIRs) of MVAs is performed, and these lockdown trends are compared with archival data from corresponding previous (normal) periods. The statistical analysis shows that, during the lockdown, while the total number of MVAs fall drastically, they are more severe and have a much higher fatality rate per MVA. Also, the pattern of vehicles involved in MVAs, and resultant pattern of fatalities, also changes during lockdowns. The paper explores the reasons for these changed patterns and provides suggestions to reduce these negative externalities of pandemic related lockdowns.

This article contains firm-level data on 1) aggregated corporate governance score, and 2) financial data for the period 2010–2017. The study includes 626 companies from 6 Asian countries: China, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea and Thailand. Aggregated corporate governance score is calculated using 13 firm-level attributes: board size, board independence, CEO duality, board meeting attendance, independence of audit committee, auditor ratification, independence of compensation committee, independence of nomination committee, shareholder-approved poison pill, dual class unequal voting rights of common shares, staged board, diversity of board and board duration. Finally, six firm-level financial data are included.

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Increased presence of firms on social media like Facebook has enabled users to interact directly with the firms. As this platform is used for brand promotions, it is important for firms to understand the dynamics of user interaction that happens on the brand’s fan page. This study investigates the influence of marketer-generated content (MGC) and the recursive effect of sentiments on user interaction with the help of sentiment mining approach and negative binomial regression. The analysis is done over 2,121 marketers’ content and 22 million user content across the top five Facebook brand pages in India. The results show that an increase in positive comment sentiment triggers increased liking and sharing behaviour by the users on the marketers’ content. Moreover, users are more inclined to like and share on marketers’ contents that are informative posts. Posts containing images garner higher likes and comments, but videos have higher shares. The results are useful for the brands to understand user behaviour on a brand’s social media fan page.