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Our Bureau

Chennai, Feb. 28 The Chennai-headquartered Indian Overseas Bank (IOB) has launched ‘IOB Sampoorna’ — the total village development scheme at Kuthambakkam and Padur villages, about 40 km from here.

Announcing the launch, the Executive Director of the bank, Mr G. Narayanan, said this was the first such programme in the country where a bank adopted villages to create sustainable models for overall development covering environment upgradation, generation of new revenue streams, enhancing income and improving quality of life.

The concept has different schemes for creating green environment, improving water resources, training, educating farmers on latest techniques and alternate and cost-effective building methodologies, healthcare and rural tourism, he said.

The bank also announced loans for about 900 families based on DIR (differential interest rate) scheme offering 4 per cent to construct toilets.

Besides, Mr Narayanan also introduced SmartCard through which the customers in the villages could transact without visiting the bank. The transaction works with bio-metric identification ensuring security to the customers, he said.

Mr Narayanan told Business Line , “Our aim is to cover about 100 villages in two to three years, of which about 70 per cent will be in Tamil Nadu and the rest in Orissa.”

To a question on how the bank would be benefited, he said bank was essentially a financial intermediary but IOB would like to take a step ahead to catalyse rural development. “We don’t look at profit and loss out of this programme but see a customer base who got better on account of dealing with IOB.”

In order to take it further the wives of IOB top management would visit these villages once in a month and educate the village women on several aspects such as budgeting, etiquette, health and hygiene, he added.

More Stories on : Rural Development | Society & Development | Public Sector Banks | Tamil Nadu

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