Banks for women

8th March 2013 is being a special day which is not marked as a red letter day in the calendar but celebrated across the world as International Women's Day. Those who don’t know the background for international women’s day for them this small intro will make them understand better.

The first national Women's Day was observed on 28 February 1909 in the United States following a declaration by the Socialist Party of America Well being Indian I am ashamed to celebrate the International women’s day as in past couple of months the number of rape case per day in India has migrated from 2 case per day to 4 case per day totalling to 180 above rape cases in India. Many of my readers might acclaim that India is not the alone country on the earth to go for chasing the highest total rapes, there are many countries leading in the crime.  All I can say to them is that eye for eye is not the solution. Well I am shifting out from the main part of the topic which is related to the Union Budget of 2013-14. The Indian government invited every member of the parliament for the inauguration of the 1st Women Bank. Well this was not a gift for the International Women’s Day but it has some rock solid economic factors to support.

Women lending has made a phenomenal growth over the last couple of years. The data from RBI makes the decision of women bank to be very strong.

This reveals that women business opportunities are growing that entrepreneurship growth is equivalently growing. In my research I found that state wise contribution of Small Scale entrepreneurship by women are on the rise.

State-wise distribution of small scale industrial units owned by women entrepreneurs

In 2001 RBI changed the law and created the revolution for the women of India. RBI made mandatory 5% of the net of PSB lending would be directed towards women. The revolution created its impact by surpassing the limit on 2011-12 to 7.3%. Recently RBI has extended that women are entitled to get Rs.50000 for each borrower. In 2011-12   15 million women got benefit from the lending programme of RBI.

Among the various banks the lending figure is very much impressive enough for the PSB.

According to the recent study by the World Bank there are just 26% women account holders as compared to 46% men’s in India. This is an opportunity which has lead the government to go for exclusive women Bank. Since women park their monetary segment either with Cooperative societies, Credit Unions, Post Office and micro finance organizations. Well more than 6, 50,000 villages in India don’t have banks hence this is an immense opportunity for the banking space to grow. But a question comes to mind that why these numbers and values were not identified earlier. Since, we still value women as pound of flesh and as food stuff for the cannibal part of the society. Happy International Women’s Day.