Uttarakhand banks asked to improve CDR

Faced with “extremely low” credit deposit ratio (CDR) of some private and public sector banks in Uttarakhand, the state-level bankers’ committee (SLBC) on Wednesday asked them to show desirable results with a warning not to provide wrong data especially related to the small and medium enterprises (SME) sector.

“We have noticed that some of the banks provide wrong data. We will not tolerate this since the Prime Minister office is directly monitoring it,” Dr Amarendra Sahu, regional director, RBI, told at the meeting.

Sahu also asked all the regional heads of the banks, who often stay away from such meetings, to remain present in the future and provide data in time so as to carry out a comprehensive review of the performance.

Reviewing the performance till June this year, SLBC advised banks whose CDR is below state average, to look into the reasons and strive hard to increase it.

Some private banks like Indusind Bank and Karnataka Bank, have “extremely low” CDR which needs to be improved, the meeting noted.

Bank of India, with a CDR of 25 per cent, Central Bank of India with 28 per cent, UCO Bank with 20 per cent and United Bank of India with 19 per cent have also been advised to improve.

Significantly, the CDR has not showed much improvement this year in Uttarakhand which was hovering around 52.69 per cent till June this year.

Piquantly, Pauri, the home district of chief minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, showed the worst performance in terms of CDR which is around 24.06.per cent The total district CDR stood at 43.24 per cent which differ with state CDR of 52.69 per cent due to inclusion of outside state advances to the tune of Rs 4000 crore.

“These figures show that our banks have big scope to improve their performance,” said Jyotish Ghildyal, the nodal officer of the SLBC.

Expressing concern over the low CDR, Industries Association of Uttarakhand (IAU) President Pankaj Gupta, who was also present in the meeting, said he has prepared a potential survey that would help the banks to improve their performance. “But I am sorry to say that except one district (Uttarkashi), none of the district officials have replied,” Gupta lamented.

Presiding over the meeting, Chief Secretary Subhash Kumar asked all the banks to work for accelerating the pace of the development of the state.