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State Bank of Travancore (SBT) believes it has what it takes to handle direct cash transfers to families below poverty line as and when a guiding proposal in the Union Budget gets down to being implemented.
The Finance Minister, Mr Pranab Mukherjee, has stated in the Budget 2011-12 that the Government would provide a direct cash subsidy on kerosene and fertilisers to the poor from March next year.
CORE BANKING
Sources in the bank said that while core banking provides the required platform, the expanded ATM network and Point of Sale (PoS)-enabled business correspondents/facilitators would be sufficient to launch direct cash transfer transactions in the bank's ?core area' of business.
The core area is taken to mean mostly Kerala, the bank's own backyard, and neighbouring Tamil Nadu as against the relatively less-banked ?Bimaru' (Bihar-Madhya Pradesh-Rajasthan-Uttar Pradesh) States in North India.
In Kerala, the bank has teamed up with the State Government's Kudumbashree Mission for poverty eradication and women empowerment to implement financial inclusion.
NO-FRILL ACCOUNTS
Over the past five years, the bank has ramped up the no-frills accounts to 13 lakh and counting. The cash transfers are prospectively being targeted at these accounts.
Of these, an estimated 33 per cent is non-operational though, the sources admitted.
The fact that Kerala happens to be the most literate, most banked and most connected State makes the rollout of any banking service that much easier, they added.
IT INFRASTRUCTURE
In Tamil Nadu, the bank has roped in a private agency to implement the financial inclusion campaign, which is gathering momentum.
SBT does not find the need to invest heavily in incremental IT infrastructure as the State Bank group server in Mumbai offers sufficient computing power to fall back on in case of exigencies.
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