Jan Dhan Yojana: Bankers go the extra mile on Day 1

Bankers work overtime to meet 1.5 crore enrolment target for Day One

On Thursday morning, Vijay Kamble of Dena Bank was out early. He was joined by thousands of bankers, scouting for depositors to make the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana a success.

Kamble had his work cut out; he had to enrol 100 depositors by the end of the day to meet the target set by his bank’s senior management. “No one was coming to the bank branch...that’s why we are here to enrol depositors,” he said at a makeshift camp in a Mumbai slum.

From Mumbai’s Dharavi area, considerd to be Asia’s largest slum, to inaccessible villages in Tamil Nadu and the narrow by-lanes of Kolkata, bankers spent the day enrolling customers for the financial inclusion scheme. Under the scheme, an account holder will be given a debit card, an overdraft facility of Rs 5,000, a life cover of Rs 30,000 and an accident insurance cover of Rs 1 lakh. While the government will pick up the tab for insurance premium, the overdraft facility is guaranteed by an Rs 1,000-crore fund created out of a corpus lying unused with the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development.

It is, therefore, no surprise that the scheme has caught the attention of the common man, though many are yet to grasp its features.

In Kolkata, Biswanath Jha, a 45-year-old driver from Bihar’s Madhubani district, wasn’t aware of the scheme till he heard about it on the radio on Thursday morning. “I gather the Modi government will provide Rs 1 lakh for opening a bank account. But I’m not sure if this is true,” he said, mistaking the free insurance cover being promised with the bank account as free money. Jha, who already has a savings deposit account with State Bank of India (SBI), plans to visit a nearby bank branch to find out more. “I will probably open an account if they do not ask me for deposits.”

Manas Das, a 60-year-old slum dweller who migrated from Bangladesh decades ago, noticed State Bank  of India had set up a temporary stall in his neighbourhood. “I heard they were opening bank accounts without documents. Some of us do not have bank accounts because we don’t have all the necessary documents. I will have to find out if they will allow me to open an account,” he said.

Outside a Canara Bank branch, Sudip Jana, 35, saw a crowd gather. “I was told the government had introduced a new scheme and it would end in a couple of days. Therefore, I opened an account,” he says, adding he was asked to sign a few forms, submit a couple of photographs and proof of residence. “They asked me to visit the branch after a couple of days to collect my passbook and ATM card.”

Depositors queued up in Mumbai to get enrolled in Jan Dhan Yojana which rolled out on Thursday

To those such as Jana and Das, bankers are taking pains to explain the scheme isn’t a loan mela seen in the 80s, when banks gave farmers loans that were never returned. Bankers say they will have to put stringent norms in place so that the scheme isn’t misused. “The Rs 2,000 overdraft facility (which can be extended to Rs 5,000) will be provided only after the first six months. We will have to take a call based on the customer’s credit history and transaction pattern. So, it is not that we will extend an overdraft to everyone. We will follow a strict procedure to check who is eligible; else, it might be a problem for banks,” said a private sector bank official.

Such specifics, however, didn’t come into the picture in many areas on Thursday, when people rushed to open accounts. In rural Tamil Nadu, banks beat the day’s target by a huge margin. For that state, SBI had set a target of opening 125,000 accounts; by evening, the bank had opened 135,000 accounts. Bankers say the overdraft facility had been misunderstood, as depositors thought this money would be deposited in their accounts, as would the subsidies and freebies. The free insurance cover was another attraction. Pensioners, who had been using post offices so far, showed immense interest in the scheme.

In Delhi, banks worked non-stop for the past three days. The rush was more in branches in rural and semi-rural areas, as most in urban areas already had bank accounts. In rural regions in the national capital, long queues of applicants were recorded since the morning. R K Jain, sub-divisional magistrate of northwest Delhi, said the response from underprivileged classes such as rickshaw-pullers and maidservants had been overwhelming.

In Karnataka, it was primarily women who queued up to open accounts. A State Bank of Mysore executive said existing customers would automatically get the insurance cover, for which they had to update their accounts. Before launching the programme, bankers and government officials had conducted door-to-door surveys.

At Corporation Bank’s Worli Branch in Mumbai, Chief Manager T V Lakshmi Narasimhan was ecstatic, after receiving a letter by Modi to bankers. “The PM wants us to cover as many poor people as possible. In our branch, we have hired business correspondents to help open new accounts. We will not only meet the target, but will overshoot it,” he said.

To make the scheme foolproof, banks, as well as the government, are taking steps to link accounts with biometrics-based Aadhaar cards. The Madhya Pradesh government has gone a step further, creating a unique identity number, Samagra, for its 75 million citizens. The Samagra identity will carry all the details of the cardholder, owing to which benefits of government-sponsored schemes, typically offered to family members, will be transferred to the accounts of beneficiaries directly.

With their staff working overtime, banks will easily beat the scheme’s 15-million-new-accounts target for Thursday, a relief for bankers such as Kamble, who toiled hard during the Ganesh Chaturthi holiday to make the PM’s one-account-per-household dream come true.