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Our Bureau

Mumbai, Oct. 14 The Reserve Bank of India will soon announce the final guidelines on credit counselling centres, according to Mr B. P. Bijayendra, CGM, Rural Planning and Credit Department, RBI. He was speaking at a seminar on Financial Literacy.

The RBI had earlier brought out a concept paper on Financial Literacy and Credit Counselling Centres (FLCC) in April this year and had invited suggestions from all parties.

In May 2007, the RBI had advised banks to set up FLCCs on a pilot basis in any one district in the country. The Finance Minister had also announced in his Budget speech that retired bank officers and ex-servicemen would be allowed to become credit counsellors.

Currently, Bank of India and ICICI Bank have credit-counselling centres.

Abhay, the credit-counselling centre run by Bank of India, was set up in December 2006.

It recently opened its fourth centre in Gumla, Jharkhand. The other three centres are at Mumbai, Wardha and Chennai.

The counselling centres set up to mitigate the problems of people caught up in a financial mess, has seen around 3,800 people seek one-to-one counselling, said Mr A.P. Ghugal, General Manager, Priority Sector Lending, Bank of India.

Most of the people seeking advice are either those who are being harassed by credit card recovery agents or are unable to get loans from financial institutions as their names feature in the Credit Information Bureau (India) Ltd’s list of defaulters. People who have defaulted even once feature on this list.

Abhay’s counsellors help the people restructure their loan portfolios and formulate repayment plans.

The Reserve Bank of India had earlier urged banks to set up financial literacy and credit counselling centres which could help borrowers negotiate with banks for restructuring debts.

Disha, the financial counselling centre run by ICICI Bank, has centres at Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Vijayawada, Kanpur, Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata. It has seen around 3,000 people seek financial counselling with it, said an ICICI Bank official.

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