India Live Today: New Delhi: Wednesday,
September 14, 2016.
In August
2014, a few weeks after the launch of Jan Dhan, the government’s flagship
scheme under which the unbanked get bank accounts, Kamlesh, a housewife at
Purnapur village in Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly, opened an account at the Punjab
and Sind Bank’s local branch. Wife of a farmer, the opening balance in her
account was zero. This wasn’t unusual in fact, accounts like Kamlesh’s, called
zero-balance accounts, made up almost half of all the 17.90 crore Jan Dhan
accounts a year later given that most of the holders were poor and had little
by way of savings.
But on August
5 this year, when Kamlesh got her passbook updated, she was in for a surprise.
“Re 1 had been deposited in my account on September 29, 2015. I didn’t deposit
the money, I don’t know where it came from. I will ask the bank about this,”
she said. It’s not just Kamlesh, and it’s not just that branch in Bareilly, or
even that bank.
Investigating
information obtained from more than 30 nationalised and regional rural banks
under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, The Indian Express went to more than
25 villages and cities spread across six states, checked individual passbooks
and interviewed account holders. To find that bank officials are quietly making
one-rupee deposits, many from their own allowances, some from money kept aside
for office maintenance. Their ostensible goal: to reduce the branch’s tally of
zero-balance accounts.
As many as 20
branch managers and officials told The Indian Express, on the condition that
they not be identified, that there is “pressure” on them to show that zero-balance
accounts are falling in number. “There was a perception that so many
zero-balance accounts means no one is using them, so there was pressure on us
to change that,” said one official.
The short-cut
was the one-rupee deposit.
Indeed, as
per RTI information provided, 18 public sector banks and their 16 regional
rural subsidiaries held 1.05 crore Jan Dhan accounts with deposits of Re 1.
From Ajit Kumar Das’s Syndicate Bank account
in Guwahati to Lallu Paswan’s Punjab National bank account in Bihar’s Barh;
from Guddi Devi’s Bank of Baroda account in Rajasthan’s Sawai Madhopur to Nizam
Khan’s Bank of India account in Raatibad near Bhopal.
They all had
Rs 1 deposited in their zero-balance accounts. There were a few cases of
despoits of Rs 2 or Rs 5, and in one case, Prem Bai of Raatibad, near Bhopal,
found 10 paise had been transferred to her zero-balance account in Bank of
India on July 20, 2016.
Indeed, at the macro level, the number of
zero-balance accounts has fallen sharply. From 76% in September 2014 to almost
46% in August 2015, then a steady fall to 24.35% on August 31, 2016.
In fact, RTI
information obtained until August 2016 shows that the percentage of accounts
with such deposits of one rupee is significant across banks and across the
country.
Take, for
instance, the case of Punjab National Bank, which has opened 1.36 crore Jan
Dhan accounts of which 39.57 lakh (almost 29%) are those with deposits of Re 1.
Bank of Baroda has 1.4 crore Jan Dhan accounts of which 12.97 lakh (9.26 per
cent) have deposits of Re 1. There’s also UCO Bank with 74.6 lakh Jan Dhan
accounts of which 11.06 lakh (14.83 per cent) have deposits of Re 1.
List of Jan
Dhan accounts from six states
And those were just the top three. Punjab and
Sind Bank, which currently has the least number of zero-balance accounts
(0.40%), refused to provide details of Jan Dhan accounts with Re 1-Rs 10 in
deposits.
At the ground
level, The Indian Express spoke to over 20 branch officials of various
nationalised banks and their regional rural subsidiaries in Assam, Bihar,
Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh who admitted, on
condition of anonymity, that the deposits of Re 1-Rs 10 were sourced from
various perks and other expenditure heads that come under their jurisdiction.
These include
entertainment allowance, conveyance allowance, canteen subsidy, office
maintenance funds, and fee obtained for Demand Drafts and online transfers. At
least 10 branch officials said they had deposited these amounts from their own
pockets, just to keep the accounts alive.
They said
that most of these cash deposits were done manually with staff filling pay-in
slips in bulk. In a few cases, the money was transferred electronically by the
banks’ Business Correspondent Agents (BCA) or Bank Mitras contract staff who
take banking facilities to rural clients who are allowed to open accounts to
deposit money they take from account holders under Jan Dhan before transferring
them to individual accounts.
For example, in Rajasthan’s Sawai Madhopur
district, out of 40 bank passbooks scrutinised by The Indian Express, 15 had Re
1 credited by transfer as the first entry. None of the account-holders knew the
source of these entries.
When The
Indian Express visited Barh in Bihar, around 200 Jan Dhan account passbooks
with deposits of Re 1 were found in the office of a BCA. “I was asked by the
branch manager to deposit Re 1 in around 120 Jan Dhan accounts between October
9, 2015 and October 11, 2015. The bank officials said they would give this
amount to me later. In many other accounts, bank staffers themselves deposited
the amount to remove the zero balance,” said the agent.
“We took
money from expenditure head of the branch and put Re 1 or Rs 2 in the accounts
having zero balance. This was just to keep those accounts operational,” said a
senior official of Punjab National Bank in Barh.
“We have
noticed some such cases. There was pressure from the top level and some bank
staffers did it themselves. But such cases are only a few,” said an official at
a Central Bank of India branch in Bareilly.
“In my
branch, nearly 1,000 such accounts were opened. Due to pressure from the top
level, I deposited Re 1 in many of those accounts myself,” said a branch
official at Baroda UP Gramin Bank in Bareilly, a subsidiary of Bank of Baroda.
“I was
heading another branch before being transferred here and I had personally put
Re 1, Rs 2 and Rs 3 in around half of the around 1,000 accounts opened under
Jan Dhan in that branch. It was the usual practice in the branch due to
pressure from the top,” said an official of the Aryawarta Gramin Bank, a
subsidiary of Bank of India, in Mainpuri, UP.
An official
at Bank of Baroda’s Baler branch in Rajasthan claimed that the bank’s “business
correspondents may have put Re 1 in those accounts to encourage banking
practices” among villagers.
“The branches
have certain targets and there is pressure. For the last one year or so, we
have ensured that new accounts are opened with some deposit. But there are
issues with accounts opened earlier in bulk. It is difficult to persuade those
account holders to deposit money,” said the official.
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