"With sound digital and financial literacy, we aim to make the rural community self-sufficient."
Ravinder Rana is a financial literacy counsellor, an appointee by the RBI, for the Kangra district. He does a certain amount of fieldwork where he organizes seminars/meetings jointly with the Panchayat, six or seven times a month to interact with the community. Through financial literacy developments, they hope to help the community become self-employed.
Rana believes that the current financial literacy programmes are inadequate and there is a need to understand the pain points of the society and work up from there. In remote villages, where banking facilities are not available, the government has appointed a oneman-army, known as a bank correspondent, who works in conjunction with the town branches to provide doorstep banking facilities in these villages. The Post Office, too, has recently started a similar initiative.
As per Rana, banks are not too efficient when it comes to disbursing information to the people, given that a majority of bank employees and managers do not have comprehensive information about the available government schemes and its relevance to the intended beneficiary. Hence, he says, it is more effective when done in person. The community currently is not very tech-savvy, with only a small number using UPI and the BHIM app, further emphasizing the need for hand-holding.
Himachal Pradesh has 12 financial literacy advisors who are responsible for imparting basic financial literacy and educating the community about government financial schemes. They also work with regional rural banks and corporate banks to initiate banking education at grassroots levels. At present, one counsellor is responsible for covering a range of 60-70 km.
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