Bangalore: In order to aim at bringing unbanked area in to banking fold, the government is all set to launch a new nationwide campaign for financial inclusion, Swabhiman in the New Year wherein the key idea lies in transforming the programme into an extensively based political association. Sonia Gandhi, the Congress President would be bringing the campaign into public notice in New Delhi,as reported by Kumud Das, Sitanshu Swain.
The government is ambitiously seeking the banking services growth to spread into the selected 73,000 villages having population up to 2000, by March, 2012 with the assistance of the financial inclusion programme. The primary idea of the campaign is to spread financial literacy amongst the people.
In order to launch the nationwide campaign at the hands of Congress high command by speaking to FE, KV Eapen, the finance ministry is on red alert for the preparation of ground work. As the confirmation was received from the ministry of finance about the financial inclusion campaign, with the assistance of Indian Banks' Association (IBA), the other banks have been asked to come out with similar campaigns.
"Through the Swabhiman programme, we are not only concerned about opening of nearly 4 crore no-frills accounts in the country. We also want that there must be transactions through those accounts to make it a huge success," said Eapen. "The Centre wants banks to take the help of business correspondents (BCs) to reach masses in rural areas. Finally, we expect the banks to adopt the route to popularize the electronic benefit transfer (EBT) scheme too, through which the government makes payments to the workers involved in various government-run schemes by way of smart cards," he said.
18 state-owned banks which included Central Bank of India CMD S Sridhar, Indian Overseas Bank CMD M Narendra, Bank of Maharashtra CMD AS Bhattarcharya, and Indian Bank CMD TM Bhasin represented the banking industry and also concluded on a lot of strategies which can be helpful for the implementation of the government agenda.
In order to have a final review, another meeting in Mumbai will be organized by the finance ministry towards the February-end. Financial inclusion is a compulsion and not just an option according to Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council chairman C Rangarajan. "Banks need to think on how to meet the challenge of meeting the credit demands of the marginalized," he had suggested. Bhaskar Sen, CMD, United Bank of India opined that the role of a bank has already been made clear which requires more aggression so that the financial inclusion target can be achieved
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