SUBHASH CHANDRA AGRAWAL
(Guinness Record Holder & RTI Activist)

‘Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojna’ launched by Prime Minister Narender Modi on 28.08.2014 getting tremendous popularity with record 1.5 crore bank-accounts with multiple facilities and equal number of Insurance-policies issued on the very first day of its launch in user-friendly and simple manner should rather be made compulsory to get any subsidy, insurance-claim or fund-transfer by government-agencies to individuals to prevent existing loopholes resulting in draining out public-money to undeserving ones. Even subsidy on cooking-gas should be returned back in bank-accounts opened under this scheme rather than giving directly as at present. Scheme can also be used to check frauds in grabbing of insurance-claims instead of their reaching actual beneficiary.

Planners of the scheme deserve all compliments for their wisdom by incorporating a nominal amount of overdraft-facility in the scheme, because any default in re-payment may perhaps make defaulter deprived of any subsidy or monetary benefits provided under various government-schemes for ever thus saving huge amount of public-money presently spent on a subsidy-regime and populist government-schemes started either by Union or state governments. All populist loan-schemes should now be banned. Bank-managers are first given targets to distribute such small loans, and thereafter are pulled up for non-recovery because most loan-takers do not care to pay back such loans given without proper guarantee.

But such a massive scale of new bank-accounts will require vast expansion of existing banking-network costing heavily on public-sector banks. This can be avoided by merger of too many public-sector banks in some less number of big banks. Presently at many places, there are nearing bank-branches of different public-sector banks with negligible business. Merger of public-sector banks resulting in large scale cut in unnecessary banking-overheads due to too many banks will thus compensate for funds required to expand banking-network.

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