Enlarging the scope of ongoing ambitious financial inclusion (FI) programme which was targeting 73,000 villages initially , ministry of finance (MoF) has asked the banks to prepare plans to cover 6 lakh villages in the country. All the banks, involved in the FI project, have been asked to furnish the details of the villages to be covered by them by June 15.
Arvind Kumar, the newly-appointed joint secretary in the finance ministry, met the officials of the Indian Banks? Association (IBA), Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the senior officials of a number of state-owned banks at New Delhi Friday last.
Earlier while interacting with the heads of public sector banks (PSBs) , Shashikant Sharma, financial services secretary, had asked them to start working towards covering the entire 6 lakh villages in the country under the ongoing FI programme.
The MoF had asked the IBA and RBI to prepare an action point for this during the forthcoming meeting.
In the scaling up financial inclusion programme, the government has asked them to include those villages with a population of 1,000 that are located in the periphery of those villages that are having population above 2,000 and which are already being covered under the programme. In toto, there are nearly 1 lakh such villages in the country with a population of 1000.
IBA will write to the state level bankers? committees (SLBCs) in the country that will further get the details from their respective district level coordination committees in this connection so as to prepare a roadmap. Also, the government will ask the banks to take the Swabhiman project, a nationwide awareness programme on financial inclusion which was kicked off by the UPA chief Sonia Gandhi in February to the grassroots level.
Talking to FE, K Unnikrishnan, deputy CEO who had attended the meeting, IBA, said the problem was only with those regional rural banks (RRBs) that were yet to complete core banking solutions (CBS). However, they will expedite the process of FI once they complete the CBS by September, added Unnikrishnan. There are 20,000 to be covered by the RRBs under FI, whereas they have been able to cover only 3,000-4,000 villages so far.