the strategy envisages ways of creating awareness and educating consumers on access to financial services ; availability of various types of products and their features ; changing attitudes to translate knowledge into responsible financial behaviour ; and enabling consumers of financial services understand their rights and obligations. the strategy necessitates active involvement of individuals, financial sector regulators, educational institutions, ngos, financial sector entities, multilateral international players and the governments both at centre and state levels. national strategy for financial education our national strategy envisages a time frame of five years for its massive financial education campaign and aims at establishing initial contact with 500 million adults, educating them on key saving, protection and investment related products so that they are empowered to take prudent financial decisions. it also seeks to create awareness about the consumer protection and grievances redress machinery available in the country. basic financial education is aimed to be included in school curricula up to senior secondary level. this is based upon the premise that the most effective way is to weave financial education into the normal content of curriculum. accordingly, we are engaging with the curriculum setting bodies like the national council of educational research and training ( ncert ), education boards like the central board for secondary education ( cbse ), central and state governments to try and embed such concepts in the school curriculum. one of the objectives of the nsfe is to standardise the messages that various stakeholders seek to disseminate through their financial education initiatives. the nsfe document identifies certain simple messages i mentioned earlier in my speech such as why save ; why invest ; why insure ; why save with banks ; why borrow within limits ; why repay loans in time ; why borrow for income generating purposes, what is interest and how moneylenders charge very high interest rates, etc. it is a well - recognised fact that standardisation will help in ensuring consistency in the messages which reach the target audience from various sources and making them more focused and powerful. integrated approach – financial inclusion through financial education we have already done some work in this direction. we have designed a mass scale financial literacy program to integrate the financially excluded population with low level of income and low literacy level with the formal financial system. the program is run through our financial literacy centres set up by banks, nearly 800 in numbers. about 40000 rural branches of the banks would scale up these efforts by conducting one outdoor literacy camp bis central bankers ’ speeches in a month. in addition to this we leverage the infrastructure created at the state level,

comprising of state level bankers committee ( slbc ) at the apex which is ably supported by the lead district managers ( ldms ) at the district level. financial literacy centres organise outdoor literacy camps which are spread over a period of three months and delivered in three phases wherein along with creating awareness, accounts are also opened in the literacy camps. the program has been received well on the ground as an integrated approach of financial inclusion through creating awareness and providing access simultaneously. in order to ensure consistency in the messages reaching the target audience of financially excluded people during the financial literacy camps, we have issued comprehensive financial literacy material containing a financial literacy guide, financial diary and a set of 16 posters which contain very simple messages of how to save. for instance, we are a nation of tea drinkers. so we just explain graphically that everyone can drink two cups of tea less! walk into a bank walk into prosperity and so on and so forth. conclusion while it is important to begin teaching financial skills at school level, achieving and maintaining financial know - how is a lifelong undertaking. the types of financial decisions that people have to make vary through the course of their lives, and thus we are trying to ensure that access to financial education is readily available at all stages of life with the help of other stakeholders. moreover, relevant, accurate, and reliable financial information must be readily available to consumers at the time they are making their decisions. through financial education, we try to provide individuals with the knowledge and skills they need to make better choices about finances. through consumer protection, we can safeguard individuals against harmful practices and bad information that lead to poor financial choices. accomplishing these two goals we believe will result in economic empowerment for all concerned. while a number of measures have been taken and are being taken in india, given the enormity of the task, a lot of ground still needs to be covered. apart from the government and the regulatory bodies, there is a need for involving the civil society and all other stakeholders in spreading financial literacy. the widespread existence of financial illiteracy indicates that we need to do a lot more. there is a lot of skepticism on whether financial literacy actually leads to changes in behaviour and some recent papers which suggest that this does not and it is the classic conundrum of being able to take the horse to the water but not being able to make him drink! bilal zia our world bank researcher and colleague and i discussed this thoroughly at dinner and we concluded that the trick vests