Financial Inclusion and Jan Dhan Accounts
December
16, 2015
Financial
Inclusion and Jan Dhan A/Cs
This refers to the
encouraging report card on Jan Dhan (Economic Times, Over 19 cr A/Cs Opened under Jan Dhan,
December 16). The effort to increase the outreach of financial inclusion by
packaging Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT), life insurance cover (though the cover
is too low at rs30,000) and RuPay card is commendable and needs proactive
cooperation from all financial institutions including banks in the cooperative
and private sectors. Needless to mention that there would be several overlaps,
double-counting and some ‘misuse’ of facilities, as the noble intention and the
enthusiasm with which public sector banks have supported the efforts outweighs
the negatives.
Centre should support
PSBs to improve their manpower and skills for coping with the increasing burden
arising from opening more than 19 crores of accounts on their books in a period
just over one year. 19 crore accounts plus the incremental number of accounts
@2 lakhs every day can end up in diverting manpower and resources from crucial
areas like appraisal and follow up of credit,
where PSBs are already lagging behind their private sector counterparts. Banking
is a sector in which technology can speed up several operations, credit
appraisal and follow up of disbursed credit for monitoring health of assets
created and ensuring timely recovery machines or software can do precious
little.
M
G WARRIER, Mumbai
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