Meet the bank sakhis

Last year, I spent a day with some pensioners in a south Delhi slum to understand if and how they were benefiting from their brand new Jan Dhan accounts. It turned out that the majority of people I met that day were illiterate and could neither make head nor tail of their passbooks. The saddest tale I heard was of an old widow with her mentally challenged son, both beneficiaries of government schemes, who would stand outside their bank after getting their passbooks updated, waiting for a kind stranger to read and figure out whether their pensions had reached their accounts or not. These interactions convinced me that without well-thought-out strategies of financial inclusion, simply making zero balance accounts open to all — and mandatory to use to access social security benefits — would likely not have much impact. Imagine my enthusiasm then, when I recently met Pari Singh, a confident 22-year-old who is a bank sakhi (friend) in Jharkhand. 

A member of the State Rural Livelihoods Mission’s financial inclusion project, Jharkhand State Livelihood Promotion Society (JSLPS), this BSc second year student works part-time at State Bank’s branch in Patamda near Jamshedpur. Her job is primarily to making first-time female customers feel comfortable with their banking experience. “This isn’t easy, since in my community, most women are not literate and migration and alcoholism have taken away most of the men,” she told me when she visited Delhi last month to receive the Plan India’s Youth Champion for Girls’ Rights Award for 2018. “To many, the bank seems like an alien, confusing place which makes them nervous and shy,” she added. 

Singh provides a friendly interface between the bank and her community. “I help them fill out deposit slips, tell them where to go for different transactions and inform them about any new bank schemes that might benefit them,” she said. “Once they become familiar with the bank, most of them feel more confident about transacting on their own.”

Additionally, JSLPS is also working to reduce the financial vulnerability of rural women by helping them to organise into self help groups (SHG). Here too, the friendly bank sakhi plays a crucial role. “First, I tell them that they can support each other as a group if they all start a system of collective saving,” Singh explained. Once the SHG is formed, members begin putting aside a small sum each month, creating a corpus which can be used to aid members in financial distress. “I help the SHG set up a bank account and help fill out all their forms as well,” she said. All in all, Singh gets a commission of about Rs 5,000 per month for her friendly efforts. 

As she prattled about an aunt whom she’d convinced to join a SHG, I mused that bank sakhis like Singh are probably easier to trust because they belong to the community they service and speak the same language. This makes them arguably the most effective tool of financial inclusion today. Sadly, however, none of the pensioners I’d met in Delhi had even heard of them. Meanwhile, more women have started frequenting the State Bank of India branch in Patamda, which makes Singh very proud. “I believe every woman should have a bank account,” she said. “I’m happy to teach them how best to use it!”.