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| Sreelatha Menon: Literacy for banks | | Swabhimaan does not address the inability of banks to read Indian languages |
| Sreelatha Menon / New Delhi Feb 27, 2011, 00:11 IST |
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Khushibala Mondal, a domestic help, managed to open an account in a bank in Noida in Uttar Pradesh last year. But she has not been able to either deposit or withdraw money. The reason is that she can write and read only in Bangla. And, bank cheques and deposit slips don’t recognise her language. In other words, the bank is illiterate as far as she or people like her are concerned. For all practical purposes, she is still financially excluded. Also, the bank has been deprived of the Rs 70,000 deposit it would have received from her annually.
The bank’s illiteracy is not recognised by either expert committees or the Reserve Bank of India, which has come out with a scheme called Swabhimaan to cover those left out by the banking sector.
Swabhimaan allows banks to hire private companies, which send young men and women to rural areas with devices on which the account-holders who cannot read or write can swipe smart cards and operate their accounts without going to the bank.
Swabhimaan does not cover urban migrants like Khushibala or the scores of security guards or rickshaw-pullers who live in the cities. Many of them are literate but excluded just because banks don’t recognise their language. Those who read and write their local languages hesitate to approach banks and remain financially excluded. No report on financial inclusion, including the Rangarajan Committee report, talks about this communication gap in banking.
Why should a person who knows how to read and write in Bangla or Telugu be treated like an illiterate when he goes to a bank? While the level of illeteracy in the country is 34.60 per cent, a large part of the literate population can read and write only in its local language and not Hindi or English. So, it is as important for banks to improve their literacy as it is to provide smart cards to the unbanked in rural areas.
Banks, which have recognised the need for a scheme like Swabhimaan, can equip themselves with translators, even mechanical ones, to read cheques and slips written in Indian languages.
Under Swabhimaan, which the government is rolling out, about 70,000 villages are to be covered by 2012 and every village by 2015.
Urban migrants or people who don’t know English don’t come under this scheme. They have also been ignored by the report on financial inclusion prepared by a committee appointed by the Reserve Bank of India.
Fino, the company which makes smart cards, has been one of the main beneficiaries of the national mission for financial inclusion that the Rangarajan committee proposed. It has got 75 per cent of the business of providing devices, business correspondents and smart cards. Fino’s director, Rishi Gupta, says his company has 28 million customers in 230 districts in 22 states. It has provided 15,000 devices and hired as many people to take them to the villages.
Agencies like these could also be used to do something less mechanical and more simple and human, to help people arriving in every bank to fill forms and access their accounts, at least in cities where migrants are not covered by this scheme. Or, if banks could deploy machines to read all languages, then banking would become a right in real terms for every Indian, both in rural and urban India.
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