Development in the future tense

...................The attitude of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and of the corporate world is as though Assam never existed all these years and is some kind of a contemporary discovery. On a recent visit to Assam, RBI Governor D. Subba Rao spoke of the need to raise credit to micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) and agricultural sectors and for the “deepening” of financial inclusion in Assam. It passes our understanding why this awareness has come about only now after all these years. Likewise, the RBI seems to have discovered only now that the credit–deposit ratio is very low in Assam at around 47 per cent, way below the national average of around 77 per cent. All these years banks have consistently hinted at poor recovery rates in Assam compared to some of the more advanced States of India in order to rationalize this discrimination. Instead of waking up to this gross discrimination only now, the RBI and other banks operating in Assam would have done much better by realizing that this was a problem of money management rather than anything else more serious. .................................

Read - The Sentinel, Assam