The irrelevance of regional rural banks

Scope of their survival is diminishing. Even as the overall business of rural financial institutions has generally been looking up, they are struggling to scale up business volumes

The regional rural banks (RRBs), set up in the mid-1970s to provide financial services to agricultural workers and labourers, have been struggling right from the beginning. Several of them are now facing an existential crisis due to dwindling business and soaring bad assets. Bids made from time to time to prop them up through various means of handholding by the Union and state governments and the sponsoring commercial banks, which jointly own the RRBs, have failed to produce the desired results. Consequently, many of them have either collapsed or got merged with their parent banks. While the number of RRBs