Unbanked Malari gets banking services

They may not have proper roads, drinking water and other facilities but around 400 households in Malari, a far-flung area in the hilly Chomoli district of Uttarakhand, have started enjoying the benefits of banking services at their doorstep.

Malari, which remains snow-bound during the winter, is among the first of the 258 unbanked villages which would be provided banking services under a new initiative of the state government.

State Bank of India (SBI), India’s largest bank, has already opened 150 accounts with the help of a business correspondent (BC) at Malari under the Atal Adarsh Gram Yojna, a dream project of Chief Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank.

“We are working very hard to provide banking facilities to all those villages which have been adopted under the Atal Adarsh Gram Yojna,” said Sunil Pant, Chief General Manager (CJM) of SBI.

Like Malari, all other villages would also be provided banking services through BC by SBI and other lead banks like Punjab National Bank (PNB) and Bank of Baroda (BOB). All these banks have already prepared their roadmaps to providing banking services by March 31, 2011, said Pant.

And now, SBI, which has been allocated 99 of the 258 villages, wants the government to provide GPRS/broad-band connectivity to these villages so that BC can provide on-line banking services to the people at their doorsteps. In Malari where there is no such connectivity, BC generally travels to nearby Topovan area where GPRS is available for doing transactions.

SBI has selected Zero Mass Foundation, a Mumbai-based company, for the purpose of BC.

Similarly, PNB and BOB have also started work in the remaining villages in this regard.