BUSINESS HOTSHOTS AWAIT RBI NOD TO LAUNCH BANKS IN BENGAL
CHANDRA Shekhar Ghosh and Purnendu Chatterjee have a common dream. Both want to float a bank and are now eagerly waiting for Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to release the final guidelines on new bank licences. Ghosh is founder and chairman-cummanaging director of the country's leading microfinance company, Bandhan Financial Services. Chatterjee, in turn, is an NRI businessman and chairman of The Chatterjee Group (TCG). Bandhan has been doing the spadework to apply for a banking licence for quite awhile. It plans to reinforce its board by inducting one or two retired bank chief executives, whose banking experience would help the MFI in its preparation for the banking licence. Bandhan's outstanding loan portfolio crossed 3,000 crore in November, 2011. TCG's plans to also establish a bank comes at a time when the new government has promised all support to existing banks in the state for expanding business and improving credit delivery. Bengal has a glorious banking history. State Bank of India (SBI) started its journey here more than two centuries ago. State-run Allahabad Bank, UCO Bank and United Bank of India are headquartered in Kolkata and are important players in the country's banking sphere. Yet, the state suffers from lack of credit delivery in the absence of private capital. Banks' credit-deposit ratio, an indicator to a bank's efficiency in credit delivery, is 62% here, significantly lower than the national average of 74%. Of the state's 9 crore population, about 70% resides in the rural areas. The number of accounts per branch in the state has risen to 9,866 in 2009-10 from 5,046 in 1980-81 while the number of accounts per 100 adult people has risen to 77 from 40 during the same period. However, a study conducted by RBI said moneylenders were a dominant source of rural lending with about 66.5% cases being financed by village moneylenders at exorbitantly high rates of interest of around 10-20% a month. It also said nearly 40% of the rural population do not have sufficient income to open a bank account even as banks have improved their reach in rural Bengal.
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