Indian residents leave a public toilet block in New Delhi on Aug. 16, 2014.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s plan to develop India includes creating toilet access for all 1.2 billion people and opening a bank account for every adult who doesn’t already have one. India’s state-owned lenders are being called on to do both, threatening to erode profits and add expenditures at firms saddled with nonperforming loans.
Modi has asked banks to open branches within 5 kilometers (3 miles) of all of India’s 664,000 villages in order to reach 75 million households that have no access to formal financial services. After he announced on Aug. 15 a mission to build toilets in public schools, the Finance Ministry sent a memo to state-owned lenders urging them to pay for construction, according to a senior banking executive who saw it and didn’t want to be identified as the communication wasn’t public.
Banks have committed 740 million rupees ($12 million) to the toilet-building efforts, using funds for tax-advantaged corporate social responsibility projects, according to G.S. Sandhu, banking secretary at India’s Finance Ministry. They also registered 50 million new account holders and collected 35 billion rupees in deposits using temporary kiosks in villages and enlisting rural shop owners as representatives, he said.
Đăng ký: VietNam News