Poverty, illiteracy, lack of regular income and steep transaction costs keep out the poor from India's banking system.
There are various estimates on the exact number of poor in India.
BBC: 'Sharp drop' in India poverty due to welfare programmes
But there are various estimates of the exact number of poor in India and one suggests that the true figure could be as high as 77%.
The very poor in India sincerely hope that some of these billions could be channeled to trustworthy organizations to better their miserable lives, particularly in education and health care.
And it is precisely the poor of India who continue to see their horizons receding, while the upper middle class and wealthy of India (about 100 million out of 1.1 billion) continue to see their asset classes and portfolios grow.
You can find democracies that are poor (India), democracies that have completely out of control crime problems (Mexico, Columbia), democracies with yawning wealth inequality (Brazil), democracies whose economic management is nationalist and unpredictable (Argentina), democracies that are very poorly governed (Albania, Kosovo), and democracies with near-catastrophic demographic trends (Japan, Greece).
FORBES: David Satter's Curious Understanding of Russian Demographics
England's strike-rate of 112.7 is better only than India and West Indies and while the latter are simply poor at powerplays India can point to being the best at conserving wickets.
And for poor countries like India and Pakistan, there are a thousand urgently competing priorities for extremely limited government resources.
The selectors have kept faith with Ian Bell despite a poor tour of India, with Owais Shah providing batting cover.
As we just talked about, the film "Slumdog Millionaire" has raised awareness of the lives of poor kids in India.
However, he was in poor form against India last December and was dropped after the first Test defeat to West Indies in February 2009.
The outlook for the winter wheat crop is also poor, with India's main reservoirs, a source for irrigation canals, one-third below their seasonal average.
They will be heartened by Ponting's knock in the second innings as the skipper has a poor record in India, averaging just 12 from eight Tests.
As one might expect in a poor country like India, where the economy has been developing quickly over the last decade, there is still significant differences between the income classes.
He teamed up with Carnegie Mellon economist George Loewenstein and others to test 87 residents of a poor village in India on a variety of tasks involving memory, fine motor skills and creativity.
Adam Sarhan, founder and chief executive at asset-management firm Sarhan Capital, New York, cited the poor weather in India as a reason for recently dumping gold after holding the precious metal in his portfolio for more than a decade.
But the work is still around, in part because of the poor sanitation system in India.
Delayed monsoons in India and poor rains in Australia also contributed to higher prices.
New Dehli Metallo-beta-lactamase-1 (NDM-1) is thought to have emerged in India where poor sanitation and antibiotic use have helped resistance spread.
The calculations by Messrs Kharas and Rogerson, using IMF data, seem to imply there will be hardly any poor people left in India and Indonesia in a few years, which seems unlikely.
In their view, rich international firms are getting richer at the expense of India's poor.
He hasn't lost sight of his original mission, the desire to achieve "inclusive growth" for India's poor.
Separately, cricket board chief Narayanaswamy Srinivasan ruled out an investigation into India's poor overseas performance in Tests.
The riots that occasionally inflame India destroy the poor neighbourhoods but leave the wealthier parts of town untouched.
The problem for India's poor is that these opportunities aren't expanding fast enough.
India has trained poor countries' civil servants for decades, in a programme called Indian Technical and Economic Co-operation (ITEC).
ECONOMIST: Big developing countries are shaking up the world of aid
So, even in its own terms of ensuring that India's poor have access to banking services, the system does not work.
These self-help models, now growing among the entrepreneurial ultra-poor Indians, show that India could lead the way in the fight against poverty.
Building collapses are common in India, with poor construction practices often blamed.
Given the appalling lack of sanitation, it is not surprising that awareness about health and the environment was low among India's poor.
应用推荐