reality. in this endeavour focus should not only be on public sector banks but also on private sector and foreign banks. this can only be achieved with the help of the bank trade unions and the bank employees and by evolving a low - cost delivery model. reserve bank has already laid down the appropriate regulatory framework and this would de jure make banking a fundamental right. once we reach this stage, we would have no problem in enacting the law for making banking a fundamental right or at least a directive principle of state policy to begin with. by inviting me to this seminar today, you have signalled your willingness to take up this challenge. i am sure with the collective efforts of the bank trade unions, bank management, regulators and policy makers ; we would realize our dream of making banking a fundamental right which, in turn, would lay down the foundation of making 21st century as india ’ s century. i wish you the very best in your efforts. thank you! bis central bankers ’ speeches

’ s flow of funds accounts. these data include direct holdings by households, along with the various forms of indirect equity holding that involve professional management ( such as investing through mutual funds ). if uninformed individuals have played a growing and direct role in the equity market, as the paper argues, we might expect to see that direct holdings by households have become a larger share of the total equities outstanding. however, as chart 1 shows, we see just the opposite. this result may reflect the fact, as indicated in chart 2, that over the past decade, households have been reducing the portion of their equities that they hold directly and have increasingly invested through mutual funds and variable annuities ( which are essentially mutual funds combined with life insurance ). that is, households have been handing over more and more of their equity portfolio to professional managers, who tend to be relatively well informed investors. household - level data on equity ownership paint a similar picture. it is true, as shown by table 1 in the paper, that the number of u. s. households owning equity in some form has increased substantially. however, this table also shows that relatively little of this increase reflects broader direct ownership of equity. according to the federal reserve ’ s survey of consumer finances - which is the original data source for this table - only 19 percent of u. s. households owned individual stocks outside retirement accounts in 1998, barely above the 17 percent share in 1989. like the aggregate data, these figures suggest that new investors have largely been putting their money in managed accounts. technically, these data combine nonprofit organizations with the household sector ; however, the nonprofits are a small part of this aggregate, so we can safely regard the data as pertaining to households. what do we actually know about the new investors who have chosen to buy individual stocks in recent years? to my knowledge, the best source of such information is the “ equity ownership in america ” survey conducted in 1999 by the investment company institute and the securities industry association. the following table uses these data to compare the households that first purchased individual stocks after 1995 with the households whose first purchase was between 1990 and 1995. i ’ ve split the sample at 1995 to assess whether the increased access to information and sharply lower trading costs since then have lured a cohort of clearly uninformed investors to the market. as the table shows, the two groups of investors appear to be similar in important respects. there is almost no difference in median age ( early 40s