Provide banking services to all villages

BANGALORE: State-level Bankers Committee Chairman Basanth Seth has said that banking services have been extended to 1,713 villages out of the 3,395 unbanked villages that have a population of 2,000 and more in this fiscal year up to June.At the Bankers Committee Meeting here, Seth said, “To further this year’s theme ‘Financial Inclusion and Credit Flow to Agriculture’, there is a need to quicken the pace to provide banking services to the remaining 1,682 villages by March 2012.Around 6,029 villages with population between 1,000 and 2,000 have been identified and allocated to various banks to provide banking services.As the success of financial inclusion depends upon financial literacy, most of the banks have formed financial literacy and credit counselling centres and 26 such centres have been opened for counselling in the state so far.” Seth also requested the state government to direct all field-level functionaries to identify uncovered farmers through adequate publicity and asked the banks to open more brick and mortar branches in unbanked villages of backward districts for all round development of the area and to ensure that government payments like NREGA and SSP are routed through the respective bank accounts of the beneficiaries of the projects.He also said that the banks have disbursed `11,543 crore under under priority sector credit during the first quarter ending in June 2011, which is 28 per cent of the annual projection of `41,355 crore.The advances to the agricultural sector was `47,054 crore which is 18.23 per cent of the total credit on the banks.Seth also requested the banks to accelerate credit flow to poverty alleviation programmes.