RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan on Friday announced that a high-level committee had been formed to offer its recommendation on the issue of providing banking licenses to corporates.
‘The committee headed by Bimal Jalan has Nachiket Mor, Chandrakant Bhave and Usha Thorat as its members,’ the RBI Governor said in a news conference here.
He said that the committee is expected to submit its report to the RBI by January 2014.
‘The RBI has so far received a total of 26 applications from corporates keen on acquiring licensesto open banks in the country’.
Rajan was in the city to attend the State level Bankers Committee (SlBC) meeting.
Providing details on the discussion held at the SlBC meeting, the RBI Governor said that it was decided to set up a task force which would recommend ways to provide ‘e-payment’ facility for all Government schemes in Chhattisgarh.
The other issues discussed in the meeting was to increase the number of bank branches and further expand the ‘Banking Correspondent’ system, he said.
Responding to a query on a committee headed by Rajan to come out with a ‘new development index’ putting Chhattisgarh among seven other States as ‘least developed’, the RBI Governor remarked : ‘The committee was apolitical.The prime objective was to arrive at a conclusion using certain parameters such as low literacy, Higher Infant Mortality among others.’
The committee took the development parameters in terms of the size of SC/ST population in a State as a higher level of population in the category points towards issues of 'deprivation' which is an issue in Chhattisgarh, he said.
The committee members were not shown statistics of any state for making an analysis for coming out with an inference. ‘We had 10 States in each pool and the bottom most was the least developed category of states, Rajan said.
‘There was much hue and cry about some states bracketed as ‘least developed’ but that was not the intention. ‘We want to encourage
development and in fact more funds could get allocated to the least developed States to improve their ranking’, he said.
The Central Government has accepted our formula and funds would get distributed as per the development record of the States’, he said.
To another query on the country’s growth projection of 5.5 per cent being considered below consensus by certain analysts, the RBI Governor remarked : ‘The analysis had been talking about 4.5 per cent growth but going by the good Kharif output and a surge in exports, the growth could be much higher ‘.