Allahabad Bank sets up trust for rural initiative

Allahabad Bank has set in motion the formation of the Allahabad Bank Rural Development Trust (ABRDT) to monitor the bank's rural initiative to bring training and credit linkages under a single window.

ABRDT will have a corpus of Rs 3 crore initially.

It will be entrusted with the management and supervision of all bank-sponsored farmers' and entrepreneurship development institutes, a release said.

ON Singh, chairman and managing director of the Allahabad Bank, said that a survey conducted by the Allahabad Bank special task force had highlighted the problems caused by the fact that production and services activities were not integrated with training, credit and related backward and forward linkages under the present framework.

The bank's survey had indicated that farmers, especially tillers belonging to small, marginal and tenant categories and rural entrepreneurs, pursued their economic activities in isolation without having support of any single window agency to provide credit related services.

With no institutional help reaching these categories of rural farmers, artisans and entrepreneurs, 80 per cent of the households surveyed by Allahabad Bank had not received any credit from banks.

More shockingly, 91 per cent of those surveyed were not aware of the existence of training facilities available for them.

To correct some of these anomalies in the existing system, Allahabad Bank had recently set up its first farmer and entrepreneur training institute in Rae Bareily, Uttar Pradesh.

ABRDT will soon be setting up similar institutes to cover eastern and western Uttar Pradesh as well.

A similar institute would also proposed to service the south Bengal region.