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All-India Nabard Employees Association (AINBEA) will hold a demonstration in front of the Nabard (National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development) Head Office at Bandra-Kurla Complex in Mumbai this afternoon in support of the nationwide strike in banks and public sector undertakings.
Rana Mitra, General Secretary, AINBEA, said it is evident that the 12 demands raised by the striking unions encompass burning issues of the common man. Nabard, too, has been facing serious challenges to its mandated functions such as protecting the interests of small, marginal and landless labourers, the traditional self-help groups-bank linkage model, focus to nurture and strengthen cooperative and rural banks, he added.
Low-cost find flow hit
Low-cost fund flow from both the Centre and the RBI to Nabard has been drying up. Today, only 10.7 per cent (₹70,443 crore) of its total balance sheet size of ₹6,57,798 crore as of 31 March, 2021 constitute its owned funds. Rest are borrowed resources entailing a significant outflow of interest. This is already telling upon its functioning as a development finance institution that has wider ramifications.
Links with RBI weaker
Nabard’s umbilical links with the RBI, too, are getting weaker day by day, diluting the basic mandate for which it was was created in 1982.
“We must understand a bloated balance sheet size may not only be enough to protect our apex level institutional character until and unless we do a serious introspection and join in the fight to protect the basic mandate of Nabard,” Mitra said.
Dilution of this basic mandate has a deeper connection with the operation of neoliberal economic policy and drive towards privatisation of national assets, signifying a whole range of policy shifts away from the principles of welfare economic regime, he added.
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