Haryana chief secretary asks banks to tap student potential

Chandigarh, Jul 31 (UNI) Haryana Chief Secretary Dharam Vir today called upon the banks to promote entrepreneurship among the students so as to tap their young talent and encourage them to start their own ventures.

He was addressing the 104th meeting of State Level Bankers' Committee convened here today by Punjab National Bank.

He urged the banks to target the students as this would inculcate the habit of cash management at an early age. He advised the banks to go beyond mere lending and pay attention to promote entrepreneurship.

He said that similarly, for the empowerment of women, the banks should also launch some subsidy schemes exclusively for women entrepreneurs. The scheme of Haryana Government under which a benefit of two per cent was given to women in the registration of properties in their names had yielded tremendous response as the registration of properties in the name of women had increased after the launch of the scheme.

Mr Dharam Vir said that banks could also play a pivotal role in effective implementation of Government welfare schemes. Haryana was also planning to utilize the services of the banks for the implementation of its schemes, he added.

The State Government had planned to route stipend to scheduled castes and below poverty line students and also the pension deburisburments to 16 lakh pensioners through electronics mode of banking system, he added. Over 8 lakh accounts had already been opened and 20 lakh more would be opened shortly.

The Chief Secretary said that the banks should provide ATM service in every branch whether located in urban or rural area.

Banks should also target to set up ATMs in the rural areas which would help in empowering the uneducated to use this technology.

He said that the State Government was encouraging contract and organic farming and banks could play an active role in this scheme of crop diversification.

Mr Dharam Vir thanked the banks for effective implementation of agriculture debit waiver and debit relief scheme of the Central Government within a short period of one and a half month. He said that as many as 17 lakh farmers of the State were benefited with the relief amount of Rs 2146 crore under this scheme.

The Executive Director of the Punjab National Bank, Mr J M Garg said that the banks registered annual growth of 49.61 per cent in extending loans to small and medium enterprises in Haryana against annual target of 20 per cent growth. The banks also achieved target of doubling the credit to small and medium enterprises.

Banks disbursed total loans of Rs 11,293 crore in Haryana during the last financial year.

Mr Garg said that the limit of bank loan to individual for housing having lower risk rate of 50 per cent had been enhanced from Rs 20 lakh to Rs 30 lakh. All transactions of Rs one crore and above had been made mandatory to be routed through the electronic payment mechanism.

As many as 154 new branches of commercial banks and regional rural banks were opened in Haryana in the last fiscal year, thus raising the number from 1816 to 1970.

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