Commissioner-cum-Secretary, Panchayat Raj and Drinking Water Department DK Singh launched the Phase III of the EShakti Project at the Nabard office premises here on Wednesday.
The project aims at digitisation of all SHG accounts to bring SHG members under the fold of financial inclusion, thereby helping them access wider range of financial services together with increasing the bankers’ comfort in credit appraisal and linkage.
Singh lauded the efforts of Nabard on digitizing the SHGs books of accounts and registers.
Nabard CGM Dr KC Panigrahi briefed on the benefits of EShakti project and how it has main-streamed SHG members with financial inclusion agenda and enabled them to access wide range of financial services. He reiterated the Nabard’s commitment to cover all the districts of Odisha in a phased manner.
The programme was also attended by dignitaries like Convenor, SlBC, representatives from RBI, Odisha Gramin Bank and other stakeholders.
Notably, Jagatsinghpur district was selected for digitisation of SHGs during 2016-17 and the project is being implemented in eight blocks of the district, viz., Balikuda, Ersama, Kujang, Tirtol, Jagatsinghpur, Biridi, Nuagaon and Raghunathpur. At the end of September 2017, 10,432 SHGs have been digitised. The process has captured relevant data like bank-wise savings linked status of SHGs, savings corpus, loans availed, NPA accounts and is capable of generating the MIS reports.
Owing to tremendous response during the first two phases, the Nabard has further expanded the project to 75 more districts of the country under Phase III. Under Phase III, six districts in Odisha, viz. Rayagada, Sambalpur, Cuttack, Bhadrak, Jajpur and Dhenkanal will be covered.