UP achieves milestone in financial inclusion

Uttar Pradesh has achieved a milestone with utter completion of financial inclusion Phase I, which stipulated that every household should have a bank account.

Etawah was the last remaining district in UP, that has also been declared to have achieved 100 per cent financial inclusion.

Now, the commercial banks and regional rural banks (RRBs) are working towards achieving There are 14,625 such villages in UP, of which about 8,100 villages have already been provided banking facilities through brick and mortar bank branch, business correspondents, mobile banks or kiosks.

All the banks have been mandated to complete financial inclusion by March 2012. “The task of financial inclusion has been progressing rather well in UP and we are confident of achieving the target,” a senior Bank of Baroda (BOB) official told Business Standard . BOB is the State Level Bankers’ Committee convener in UP. A total of 1,04,417 villages were adopted for financial inclusion by banks as per Service Area Approach in the state. They comprised over 27 million households.

About 18 million no-frill accounts were opened for households, which previously had no such facility. Besides, the banks issued 2,60,000 general purpose credit cards to these households. Going forward, the banks would endeavour to encourage the account holders to avail of various banking facilities. Every district has a lead bank, which has the primary responsibility of ushering financial inclusion programme in that region.

In UP, nine public sector banks viz. Allahabad Bank, Bank of Baroda, Bank of India, Canara Bank, Central Bank of India, Punjab National Bank, State Bank of India, Syndicate Bank and Union Bank of India are the lead bankers.

BOB is harnessing the Mobile Banking Van (MBV) route to provide banking services in remote areas. Bank CMD’s Managing Director, Mallya had earlier launched two such vans for Allahabad and Varanasi districts. BOB has over 650 branches and 270 ATMs in UP. The bank is planning to open 60 more branches and 62 ATMs in the state.

Allahabad Bank proposes to increase its number of ATMs, including bio-metric ATMs. UP alone would get 150 new ATMs and 150 new branches in near future.