Bank accounts for poor children in India and developing nations

¶ … poor children is to fund bank accounts of modest value for every child whose birth is officially recorded in public records. The proposal is to use public funds to establish a bank account for every newborn infant at the time of birth and to protect it from being accessed by anybody until at least the child's sixteenth birthday. The idea was advanced by a Finance professor of Indian descent at the University of California, Los Angeles. The concept is already in practice in several wealthier nations but not in India where at least 100 million poor children could benefit from it tremendously, according to its chief proponent. The suggestion is not necessarily limited to India but that is the main focus of the program.

Primary and Secondary Policy Goals

The primary policy goal of the idea is to help give those who make up the poorest half of the world's population an opportunity to have access to mainstream financial services. Currently, those individuals are at much greater risk of many threats to their health, safety, and welfare than are people with some financial savings and awareness. As a result, they are especially vulnerable to illegal money lending operations that exploit their poverty.

The secondary policy goal of the idea is particular to Indian society, but equally applicable to those with the same problem of unregistered births that is apparently a social and public administration problem in India. Specifically, the author hopes that the same idea could be used to incentivize the legal registration of births among the poor because that registration would be an administrative prerequisite to program eligibility.

Personal Fiscal Practices and Management after Completing BUS 1000

My personal fiscal practices and management have changed recently, partly because of the current economic recession and even more so since enrolling in BUS 1000. For one thing, I realize how wasteful relatively small unnecessary purchases are because of the way they add up. Since that realization, I have stopped buying bottled water and soda by the serving and I have also stopped buying coffee. The savings corresponding to those choices amount to as much as $1,000 or more every year and are completely unnecessary because coffee, soda, and bottled water can all be purchased much more economically wholesale and carried to class and work. More generally, I have committed never to fall into the trap of relying on credit. Instead, I purchase only what I can afford or what I can save up for to pay in cash for all consumer goods and services.

Reference

The Economist "A FAB Idea: Should Every Child Receive a Bank Account at Birth?"

(March 4, 2010).