To review the situation in Uttarakhand, post- demonetisation, the Union Cabinet Secretary PK Sinha convened a meeting with Uttarakhand Government officials led by the Chief Secretary S Ramaswami through video-conferencing on Friday.
CS apprised that 12740 news accounts were opened by holding 635 special camps in the districts of the state. These accounts belong to the labourers working in the unorganised sector to spare them suffering, CS said, adding that more such camps would be held to help the left-out persons open bank accounts.
Currently, 2216 branches of the banks are functional in the state- 1108 in rural areas, 670 in semi-government areas and 437 in urban areas. CS said he has issued advisory to the banks to ensure that each customer should have ATM facility and in case they do not have they are provided with the same immediately. AT present 80 percent bank customers have debit card facility and remaining customers will be issued debit card in the coming days, CS told Sinha.
To reduce the queue in the banks, they have requested RBI to convene meeting with the national payment corporation of India and the private companies, which are having mobile wallet and also to send experts so that they can educate the people through CII to ensure that even the grocery stores can go for cashless transaction structure. This would help the switch to cashless facility, CS said.
In the state 4000 citizen service centres are functional and the state administration would hold digital payment and financial literacy training camp at the district and block level in the next 10-15 days. They will train entrepreneur at village levels, CS said during the video conferencing. There is some connectivity problem in the remote areas of the hills and keeping this in view, the administration is going for the installation of 914 V-sat to be set up by the banks. So far SBI has installed 18 V-sat in remote areas, Ramaswami informed.
To ensure cash transaction, business correspondents are functional too to help the people withdraw money through ATMs apart from their banks, he said, adding that the state level bankers along with RBI are consistently monitoring the situation.
During the video conferencing, among those present were the principal secretary Manisha Panwar, secretary Amit Negi, secretary IT Deepak Gairola, regional director RBI Subrat Roi, DGM SBI Subir Kumar Mukherjee and AGM Ramesh Pant.