Indian Express: New Delhi: Tuesday,
September 13, 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.
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