All villages to get access to banking in next 5 yrs: RBI

"All the banks have been asked to bring the technology, including the back-end technology and hand-held machines to link up the UIDs(Unique Identification Number)... to support this programme. This will be done in the next 5 years", he said.

When asked about the success of the programme at places where it has already been implemented, he said, "Financial inclusion was successful in South Indian states, especially, Andhra Pradesh. In Sikkim, the Government was helping in the implementation of (this) programme."

He added,"I will not gloat over the success as it is in the initial stage. But, definitely, there had been pockets of success wherever they had been implemented efficiently.

So far five crore people have non-frill accounts, though some of them are not functioning."
Under the government's financial inclusion programme, business correspondents are being appointed in villages lacking access to banks, to provide them banking services by linking their UIDs with the banks through the hand-held machines.

Chakraborty, who was inaugurating the distribution of smart cards to the people of Vendhoni Village near here, said 35,000 villages out of six lakh villages in the country had bank facility, while the rest would be covered by business correspondents.

He said that the RBI would monitor implementation of the outreach programme, and that implementation and success of the programme was a collective responsibility of Panchayat presidents, Self-help groups and NGOs.