Spread banking to every village: PNB

Stressing on the need to spread banking to every village, Punjab National Bank CMD K R Kamath has said there should be a proper system put in place to take Indian banking to remote villages.

Banks would also face a big challenge on the human resources front with many people retiring, thus creating a big vaccum.

“We have no capability to make large recruitments. Again, we have not enough capability to train all of them,” he said at a seminar on ‘The emerging challenges before the Indian Banking Industry’ here.

Kamath, who is also Vice Chairman, Indian Banks’ Association, said financial inclusion is a must.  “We have to spread banking to every village. For that a proper system has to be put in place. We have correspondent system now. But it lacks proper supervision. So new technology should be developed. This is going to be a great challenge for us,” he said at the seminar, organised jointly by State Forum of Bankers’ Clubs and Greater Kochi Bankers’ Club here.

The downturn in the economy has started affecting the banking industry in India, he said. “Earlier, we had the problem of asset quality. Thanks to securitisation Act and growth in GDP, NPA came down to satisfactory level in recent years. But as a result of the recent downturn in the economy, again we are groping with the NPA problem now,” Kamath said.

Another problem was the generation gap. Sometimes the supervisor may be supervised by the supervisee as the old generation had no knowledge in IT, he said.