Banking reach target tough to achieve

PATNA: The banks in the state face a tough task of extending banking facilities to all 9,213 villages, each with a population of over 2,000, by the end of the current fiscal, as only 2,449 such villages had been covered so far. As many as 6,764 such villages remain to be covered.
Deputy CM Sushil Kumar Modi, who reviewed the banks' working at the State Level Bankers' Committee (SLBC) meeting held on Thursday, said the bankers should pull their socks on this front to meet the target."We want you to cover all these villages within the 11{+t}{+h} Five Year Plan itself, which ends in March next year," said Modi.
SBI chief general manager (CGM) Jeevandas Narayan, who chaired the SLBC meet, said that the bankers faced great responsibility, as the new RBI plan of extending banking facilities to all the villages having less than 1,000 people would begin to be implemented from the next fiscal (2012-13).
Modi said the bankers had adopted three modes - mobile banking, e-kiosk for online banking by linking with Vasudha Kendra in the blocks concerned, and business correspondent (BC) model in which BC deployed by a bank in a village operates through a handset to conduct banking transactions - to cover these villages. SBI has adopted e-kiosk mode to reach out to its target villages.
The plan envisages a no-frill account with zero balance of at least one person from every family. Modi said that 66 lakh no-frill accounts had been opened in the state till June 30. Of them, 51.62 lakh accounts were active, while the remaining 14.38 lakh accounts were not active, he added.
According to him, the RBI, in view of the trend witnessed in the country, had asked the bankers to allow overdraft withdrawals of Rs 500 to Rs 1,000 so that no-frill accounts did not become dead, and it would also inspire the account holders to make small savings. Otherwise, active no-frill account holders could make overdraft withdrawals in the range of Rs 5,000-Rs 10,000 in a year, Modi said.
Appreciating the bankers' performance in the first quarter of the current fiscal, Modi said that the challenge before them was of disbursing Rs 43,000 crore under the Annual Credit Plan (ACP) during the current fiscal.
Incidentally, of all the 38 districts, the CD ratio of Begusarai was abnormally high at 85% during the first quarter of the current fiscal, as advances made to the Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) and National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) outside the state for use in Bihar had been accounted for in calculating its CD ratio.