Excelsior Correspondent
JAMMU, June 5: Reserve Bank of India is celebrating the week June 5-9, 2017 as “Financial Literacy Week” across the country. N K Sahu, Regional Director, Reserve Bank of India, J&K formally inaugurated the function today at Jammu. The programme was also attended by senior officers of the various banks operating in J&K.
Financial Literacy is the first step towards financial prosperity. Financial literacy helps address demand side barriers as this makes customers informed and enables better financial decision making and ultimately financial wellbeing. Customers who demand information play an important role in ensuring transparency of financial institutions and this transparency in the market encourages institutions to compete on the basis of better products and services and at lower cost.
RBI drives its financial literacy efforts through the financial intermediaries. Banks have set up Financial Literacy Centres (FLCs) to focus their financial awareness efforts and the rural branches of banks also conduct programmes to create awareness. Going forward, RBI will be piloting an initiative wherein NGOs would be collaborating with banks to extend the level of outreach through innovative and participatory methods at the block level.
In order to create awareness at a large scale on key topics every year, it has been decided to observe one week in a year as financial literacy week and the idea is to focus certain key messages across all available channels with the intention of reaching out to the masses. This year, one particular week (June 5-9, 2017 this year) has been decided to be observed as Financial Literacy Week across the country and the activities will be common across the country to maximize the impact.
This year Bank has selected the themes of KYC, Exercising Credit Discipline, Grievance Redress and Going Digital in line with the prevailing economic environment. The messages will be communicated through posters in bank branches, ATMs and websites of banks.
Besides this, RBI is also putting in place a structured training program for the FLC Counsellors and rural branch managers on the core competencies of financial literacy. RBI is also coming up with target specific financial literacy content for different target groups like Farmers, Small entrepreneurs, School children, SHGs and senior citizens.
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