Following a directive by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), banks are now rushing towards preparing a roadmap in coordination with Indian Banks? Association for their financial inclusion programmes before March 2010.
However, they may not be able to provide complete details of their business plans within the deadline of March 31 due to technical reasons, say the sources familiar with the development.
All the commercial banks, be it public, private or foreign banks, have been asked by RBI to report their specific board-approved plans for financial inclusion by March 2010.
Moreover, the lead bank in each district has been asked to draw a roadmap by March 2010 for ensuring that all villages with a population of over 2,000 will have access to financial services through a banking outlet, though not necessarily a bank branch, by March 2011. While delivering a speech on financial inclusion in Kolkata in December last year, RBI governor D Subbarao had hinted towards the RBI move.
However, banks may miss the target for submitting the break up of the villages they would be covering. A total of 6,50,000 villages are to be covered under the programme, the break-up for which was to be provided by the state-level bankers committees (SLBC) of the respective states by March 10.
But, SLBCs were yet to provide the details to the banks in this connection.
Some of the banks that have got the villagewise details for the programme so far include Punjab National Bank (1,847 in Haryana & 1,584 in Punjab), Canara Bank (61 in Kerala), Bank of Baroda (3,973 in Rajasthan), Indian Bank (43 in Puducherry), Dena Bank (3,604 in Gujarat) and Andhra Bank (6,868 in AP).
For example, in case of Central Bank of India, so far only the SLBC of Karnataka has allocated the number of villages to be covered by it under the programme.
Requesting anonymity, a senior official with the State Bank of India told FE , ?We are busy preparing the roadmap and will be submitting our plans before RBI within 15 days. SBI was working on quite a few pilots in this connection in states like Andhra Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh where the bank is trying to see how the things like smart card, RFID card, mobile banking can be utilised to achieve its financial inclusion targets at an affordable cost, the official added.
?We are working on technology and network to achieve our goal,? he said. The idea was to make this programme different from brick & mortar kind of banking, he added.
M Narendra, executive director of Bank of India, said,?We have to cover all the villages falling under 48 districts where my bank was acting as the lead bank and that were located in states like Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Orissa & Uttar Pradesh.? Out of them, we have already covered 100% financial inclusion in the eight lead districts, added Narendra. ?So far, we have identified 28929 service area villages and more such villages were under the process of identification,? said Narendra.
RBI wants the financial inclusion to make it possible for governments to make payments, such as social security transfers, NREGA wages into the bank accounts of beneficiaries through the ?Electric Benefit Transfer? (EBT) method. The idea is to minimise transaction costs, including leakages.
