For banks, the going may get tougher in the rugged terrains of Uttarakhand.
After providing account facilities to villages with a population of more than 2,000 by March, under the financial inclusion programme, the tasks may now be getting more difficult. The move is afoot to cover villages with a population of over 1,000, having rough terrain and bad connectivity.
There are nearly 743 un-banked villages in the hill state with a population of more than 1,000. The difficulty is that most villages are in remote areas, with majority of them having no or poor roads. The task gets tougher when scores of these villages are perched on hill tops in Garhwal and Kumaon regions. “It is going to be a challenge to cover nearly 743 villages having population above 1000,” said A K Mittal, AGM,State Bank of India.
But the task to cover 226 villages with a population above 2,000 was also not so easy. The banks toiled hard as they relied on business correspondents (BCs)to reach villagers. “We appointed BCs which in turn appointed agents to reach these 226 villages,” said Mittal, quoting SLBC data.
For covering these villages, the banks managed to open nearly new 19 branches also. A total of 63,000 accounts were opened in these villages.