Dena Bank deploys women officers for loan recovery

Public sector Dena Bank has deployed an all women team of officers for recovery of outstanding loans and bad debts.

The decision was taken after receiving complaints of alleged rough behaviour by some of the Bank field staff assigned for recovery of loans.

Of the Bank's total outstanding of about Rs 700 crore in Uttar Pradesh, bad debts amounted to Rs 200 crore, Dena Bank Chairman and Managing Director Ashwani Kumar told Business Standard here.

He maintained that recovery was a big task for the banking sector. "The proposal of forming the all women team of loan recovery officers came from the women staff themselves during the review of the Bank's performance in Lucknow Zone, which comprises 33 districts."

Kumar said the women officers' team would make field visits to villages and other places for the recovery of loans pertaining housing, retail segments and even agricultural segments.

Commenting on good monsoon this year, he said rural demand for consumer durables and automobiles was already up and there would be higher credit demand in the sectors of infrastructure, power, road, mining, farm implement, warehousing, logistics etc.

"The banks are bullish on the various fiscal policy measures taken by the central government to boost economic activities and entrepreneurship," he noted.

Meanwhile, Dena Bank had also provisioned for losses occurring due to the conversion of loans to state power distribution companies (discoms) into government bonds amounting to over Rs 350 crore.

Under the central scheme of Ujjwal Discom Assurance Yojna (UDAY), the state government has issued bonds worth almost Rs 40,000 crore to commercial banks, which effectively reduced the debt of discoms by this amount leaving merely Rs 15,000 crore worth of debt to be serviced by the discoms.

However, the conversion of loan amount to bonds have reduced the yield of Dena Bank by almost 2% to 9.70%, Kumar added. Dena Bank has 83 branches in UP with plans to launch more branches in future.