Collector sore over officials’ functioning

Visakhapatnam: Collector Pravin Kumar expressed his dissent over the communication gap between the bankers and officials of various welfare departments. Due to lack of coordination between the bankers and welfare departments, the targets are not being reached in grounding the self-employment units, he lamented.

Addressing a special District Consultative Committee meeting with bankers and welfare department heads here on Tuesday, the Collector directed the bankers to release the loans to all the sanctioned units within 15 days.

He also directed the bankers, if they fail to sanction the loans, the subsidy amount should be returned after taking a unwilling letter from the beneficiary. Though the government sanctioning various units and depositing the subsidy amounts to the beneficiary, the bankers are not sanctioning the loans, he added.

The Collector directed the bankers immediately sanction the loans sanctioned under Mudra and Start-Up India schemes. According to the NITI Aayog reports, 115 districts in the country had failed to achieve five parameters to achieve the growth rate in which Visakhapatnam district also listed.

The district had failed to cross the targets in Aadhaar seeding with the bank accounts, sanctioning of Mudra loans, PMJJB Yojana, PMSB Yojana and Atal Pension Yojana schemes. He urged the bankers to cooperate to score the prescribed five parameters as per the NITI Aayog.

Convener of SLBC KSD Siva Varaprasad said that the branch managers have to take the responsibility to implement the government’s targets under various priority schemes.

If the branch manager failed to sanction the loans, the government is exercising to levy penal amounts on the deposited subsidy amounts and the branch managers have to pay the penal amounts, he warned. For every 5,000 population, one bank branch should be established and below 5,000 population, one business correspondent should be deployed. The bankers must take action as per the guidelines, he said.