Here’s a number worth sitting with: India now has close to 2.6 billion individual bank accounts — nearly double the country’s population of roughly 1.4 billion. That isn’t a typo, and it isn’t because every adult in the country has exactly two accounts. It’s because account ownership is wildly uneven — some people still have none, and plenty of families have far more than they’d guess if you asked them to count.

The national picture

Financial inclusion in India has genuinely transformed over the past fifteen years. Roughly 96% of Indian adults now own a bank or financial account, according to the World Bank’s Global Findex 2025 report — up dramatically from about a third of the population in 2011. A large part of that shift is the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY), which alone has opened over 55 crore accounts as part of the government’s financial inclusion push.

But near-universal access to an account is a different thing from every family having a clear picture of which accounts they collectively hold — and that’s where the real gap sits.

Why one family adds up faster than you’d think

Take an entirely ordinary household of four — two working parents, a grown child who’s started a job, and a retired grandparent — and count:

A salary account for each working member, often a different bank for each job change, with the old one left open.
A PMJDY or basic savings account, sometimes opened years ago for a subsidy or scheme and rarely used since.
A joint household account for shared expenses.
The grandparent’s individual pension or savings account, sometimes at a different bank entirely.
A student or first account the grown child opened years earlier and never formally closed after switching banks.
An NRI account if anyone in the family has worked abroad at any point.

That’s six accounts before anyone’s tried to accumulate them — and this is a modest, realistic household, not an unusually complicated one. Add a small business, a second job, or a move between cities, and it climbs further.

The problem this quietly creates

Accounts opened and then left alone don’t just sit there harmlessly. According to Global Findex 2025, about 25% of financial accounts in India are inactive — no deposit or withdrawal activity in the past year. Under RBI’s own rules, a savings or current account with no customer-initiated activity for 24 months is classified as inoperative; if that inactivity stretches to ten years, the balance is eventually transferred to the RBI’s Depositor Education and Awareness Fund — the same ₹78,213 crore pool of unclaimed deposits we’ve written about before.

None of this happens because families are careless. It happens because nobody sits down and counts. Each account made sense on its own, at the time it was opened — the issue is that nobody ever adds them all up in one place afterward.

A five-minute exercise worth doing

Right now, try actually listing every bank account in your family — not from memory alone, but by checking old passbooks, SMS alerts, and half-remembered apps. Most people find at least one they’d forgotten. That list, once it exists, is the entire first step of a financial inventory — the difference between “we probably have a few accounts somewhere” and actually knowing what your family holds.

Where eKosha fits

Once you’ve done that count, eKosha is where the list stops being a one-time exercise. Record every account your family holds, note its nominee, and share it securely with the people who should know it exists — so the answer to “how many accounts do we actually have?” is never a guess again.