Accounts opened for 28,461 by August 28
When the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana was launched nationwide by the Prime Minister on August 28 last, the district administration here had already listed 28,461 persons of 25 Panchayats for financial inclusion. The list of people had been handed over to different banks operating in the district to initiate steps for opening accounts. District Collector Jaykumar V had launched the financial inclusion programme in the district one month ahead of the national launching.
“Financial inclusion is one of the critical components of economic justice and Nuapada district aims to achieve 100 per cent financial inclusion by 2015,” Jaykumar had told his officials and the banking institutions of the district. The Collector had also conducted a meeting of the bank officials to appraise them about the process and modalities.
More than 2,000 bank accounts have already been opened in the district till now. The banks involved in this process are UCO Bank, SBI, Axis, Canara Bank and ADB branch of the State Bank of India.
“We have decided to bring at least 80 per cent of the total voters of the district under the financial inclusion programme, which means about 3.5 lakh persons would have bank accounts. At present 1.40 lakh voters already have accounts and we hope that the rest would be included by 2015. We are taking it on a mission mode.” said Jaykumar.
“We got complaints from the villagers everywhere that they are facing problem in banks for opening of accounts, thus we started listing the people and in the 1st phase, we identified 25 Panchayats out of 108,” he added.
The UCO bank of Nuapada has already opened 1,165 accounts in Biromal Panchayat. It was 30 more than the total number of interested persons listed by the Government officials in their survey. It shows that the people are showing much interest in the process. “We were deprived of getting benefit of Mamata as the accounts could not be opened in the banks in time and xerox copy of the pass books could not be submitted to the Government office” complained a few women at Maharajore village of Boden block. Many in our village have been deprived of benefits under different schemes due to problems in opening of accounts. This is a great achievement for us, stated Bhojpur villagers.
The process of opening of the bank accounts however, is not without problem. The banks have expressed that there are some technical difficulties. Where there is no internet connectivity, it is not possible to take biometric of fingers and without the biometric; the prints of forms cannot be taken. “So we have asked the people to come to the Customer Support Centre of SBI at Khariar where broad band service is available,” said SBI Khariar Branch Manager.