Finance Ministry to meet chiefs of PSBs, key schemes' progress in focus

DFS secretary to review progress of financial inclusion and social security schemes

The finance ministry has called a meeting of the managing directors (MD) & chief executive officers (CEOs) of public sector banks (PSBs) along with the CEO of National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on April 13 to review progress under financial inclusion and social security schemes.

The meeting will be chaired by financial services secretary Vivek Joshi and will review schemes such as the Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana (PMMY), Stand Up India and Prime Minister Street Vendor’s AtmaNirbhar Nidhi (PM SVANidhi) scheme among others.

“Recently, the performance of the banks in this financial inclusion schemes is not encouraging and they have reached a saturation point. The PSBs have a huge presence in the rural areas and they have a significant role in covering the unbanked section of the society. The government is pushing the banks to deepen their beneficiaries under these schemes as this would enable deepening of financial inclusion in the country,” said a senior official on the condition of anonymity.

The official said that though the discussion on these financial inclusion schemes was to be held in the meeting chaired by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman last month, it got deferred as the meeting focused on the review of performance of public sector banks.

Sitharaman had chaired the meeting to review the performance of PSBs on various financial health parameters, and the resilience of PSBs in light of the current global financial scenario. Sitharaman directed PSBs to closely look at business models to identify stress points, including concentration risks and adverse exposures. 

On Wednesday, the finance ministry said under the Stand up India Scheme that completed seven years, Rs 40,700 crore has been sanctioned to over 180,630 accounts. Under the scheme, more than 80 per cent of the loans has been provided to women. The scheme aims to promote entrepreneurship at grass-root level focusing on economic empowerment and job creation and has been extended up to the year 2025.

Last month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi while addressing a post budget webinar on the subject of ‘Enhancing Efficiency of the Financial Services for Creating Growth Opportunities’ called upon the stakeholders in the financial sector to re-engineer all the processes to reduce the cost and increase the speed of credit so that it reaches the small entrepreneurs quickly driving financial inclusion in the country.

“The government has helped fulfil the dreams of crores of youth by giving Mudra loans of more than Rs 20 trillion without a bank guarantee and more than 4 million vendors and small shopkeepers received help from banks through PM SVANidhi Yojana,” he had said.