PANJIM: The Government of India has designed a bottom-up consultative process to generate ideas and review performance of public sector banks and their alignment with national priorities.
The first stage of the process was conducted by the Regional Business Office of State Bank of India (SBI) North and South Goa at SBILD, Panjim on August 17 and 18, by involving branches within their jurisdiction.
This was the first of its kind consulting where the branches themselves were asked to review their performance, deliberate on the issues before the Bank, ideate on future strategy and the way forward.
The Meet focused on major themes such as the ways and means to increase credit to various sectors of the economy, creating enablers to move towards $ 5 trillion economy, enhance use of technology to bring about innovation (digital payments) based on inputs provided by various domain experts.
Deliberations also focused on making banking citizen-centric as well as more responsive to the needs and aspirations of all stakeholders including senior citizens, farmers, small industries, enterprises, youth, students and women.
The meet also reviewed the performance of branches and their alignment with national priorities in the areas of credit support to Infrastructure, Farm, MSME, Exports & Retail sectors, Green Economy, Swachh Bharat, Financial Inclusion and Women Empowerment, DBT, Less cash/Digital economy, Ease of Living and Corporate Social Responsibility.
The meetings were attended by more than 100 officers along with Sanjay Kumar, General Manager from Mumbai LHO and M V R Ravi Kumar, DGM, Panjim Zone as observers.
As a result of the consultation, many implementable and innovative suggestions came up as to how PSBs in general and SBI in particular, may improve their performance and what the roadmap for the future should be.
The suggestions were collated and have been sent to the zonal level for further discussions at the SLBC/State level, along with comparative performance assessment of the branches under each Region.
After the SLBC level, final consultation will be held at the national level to compare both intra and inter-bank performances and to finalize the suggestions regarding the way ahead for implementation across PSBs.
This consultative process has resulted in a renewed sense of involvement and purpose down to the branch level and the Bank is geared up towards implementing the roadmap for the future, improve its performance and align itself to national priorities so that it may fulfill its mandate of partnering the Indian growth story.
