While maintaining that there had been a shift from ‘phone banking’ – a term the Modi government has coined to describe interference in sanctioning loans to a select few during the UPA tenure – to ‘digital banking’. He said that bankers would earlier receive calls from “the top” and were told how they should function and lend.
“The politics of phone banking had made banks unsafe, put them in a hole, made the economy unstable and led to scams of thousands of crores,” Modi said, while listing steps taken by his administration to clean up the system.
The PM said the DBUs, which were announced by FM Nirmala Sitharaman in her Budget speech, are meant to offer convenience as well as safety to consumers. “The government’s goal is to empower the common man and make him more powerful… we have sought to strengthen the banking system and bring about transparency, while ushering in financial inclusion… Earlier it was thought that a poor person would go to the bank to join the system, but we decided to bring the bank to his doorstep,” Modi said.
He urged banks to replicate the success of Jan Dhan.
The PM said that India was being recognised globally for the strides it had made in recent years with IMF recently lauding India’s digital banking infrastructure, while the World Bank had said the country had emerged as a leader in ensuring social security through using digital tools.
