The video of a 60-year-old woman in Odisha dragging her bedridden centenarian mother on a cot, which went viral on Sunday, highlights the problem that villagers face in accessing banks.
It has also touched upon another issue — the reluctance of many banks to open branches in rural areas and inadequate staff in the existing ones to handle rising banking demands of the villagers.
“The commercial banks are mostly urban oriented.
Except the SBI, UCO Bank, Union Bank of India, Indian Overseas Bank and Bank of India, other banks do not have sizeable presence in the rural areas,” says the State Focus Paper 2020-21 of National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD).