Canara Bank provides training programmes for rural youth

Public sector Canara Bank, as part of fulfilling its corporate social responsibility (CSR) is in the process of imparting training to rural youth to enable them to acquire jobs in various disciples.

Talking to reporters here last night, H S Upendra Kamath, Executive Director of the bank said that it had launched 23 rural development and self employment training institutes across the country and 18 rural training institutes.

Already about 79,150 youth have completed training and about 73 per cent of them have been working in various fields. The training was imparted in various disciples including software, hardware, basic computer operations, training on small enterprises management, retail trading, repair work of electrical gadgets and instruments, he said.

The bank will launch six more institutes before the end of this fiscal enabling to provide training to another 4000 to 5000 youth, he said. The bank had started an institute to train the trainers at Bangalore. As yet another CSR initiative, the bank had opened over 17.3 lakh no-frill accounts and achieved total financial inclusion in all the 25 lead districts hosted in the states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

Kamath said currently the bank has 2,966 branches in various pars of the country and obtained license from RBI to open 50 new branches. The bank has obtained formal approval from RBI to open overseas branches in cities like Johannesburg, Frankfurt, Muscat, Banama, QFC-Qatar, Leicester, New York, Sao Paulo, Dar-er-Salam and Tokya, he said, adding, it had already three branches overseas, Kamath said.

He said 2.5 per cent of the total business of the bank came from overseas operations. Earlier, addressing a function of self help groups, he said the bank had already promoted 2.9 lakh women SHGs.

The sanctioned amount for SHG disbursement was Rs 1546 crore and this would be increased to Rs 1,900 crores by the end of March 2010. The recovery percentage was over 85 per cent and the bank was ambitious to achieve 95 per cent before the end of this fiscal.