BANGALORE: On Prime Minister Narendra Modi's special request, top bankers will have to travel together in a Volvo bus from Mumbai to Pune. After the diminutive travel they will meet the PM at a retreat for insight and prepare a design for an action plan to reform the banking sector.
Among those top bankers on the bus, there will be State Bank of India chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya too. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan, and top officials of the Finance Ministry will also attend the off-site next weekend, being called a "Gyan Sangam" or knowledge meeting.
Modi has also asked the bankers, the chiefs of public sector banks or PSBs, insurance companies and organizations like NABARD, to make presentations to him at the retreat, the venue for which he reportedly asked to be shifted from Delhi to Pune. Also the bankers have been asked to stay at the National Institute of Bank Management (NIBM) campus in Pune, sources said.
According to the reports, Modi has identified six topics for group discussions, consolidation and restructuring of public sector banks (PSBs) for better efficiency and capitalization needs; effective risk profiling and recovery mechanisms; human resources-related issues with special focus on training and motivation of staff; global practices and use of technology in banking operations; financial inclusion or financial literacy and direct benefit transfer, and priority sector lending and interest subvention schemes.
The two-day retreat is all set to began on January 2 and is aimed at to find out mainly what has gone wrong and what should be done both by banks as well as by the government to improve and consolidate the position of PSBs. The effort would be to seek "out of box" ideas from prominent experts and from top level managers, sources said.
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