Chennai: The National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) on Wednesday sanctioned a grant assistance of Rs.2,08 crores to India Post Payment Bank (IPPB) for deployment of 2227 micro-ATMs in Tamilnadu under the Financial Inclusion Fund.
NABARD Tamilnadu Regional Office Chief General Manager S Selvaraj handed over the sanction letter to IPPB Assistant General Manager (Circle Head, Tamilnadu) Vijayan Kesavan at the NABARD Regional Office Wednesday.
The sanctioned amount would enable IPPB for deployment of these 2,227 micro-ATMs at the access point’s ie. village Post Offices in Tamilnadu.
With this, IPPB will be in a position to provide doorstep banking facility to the customers through their village Postmen, a NABARD release said.
NABARD extends grant support to Scheduled Commercial Banks including Payment Banks and Small Finance Banks, Regional Rural Banks and Cooperative banks for creating Financial and Digital literacy among the rural population and improving the digital payment infrastructure across the country from the Financial Inclusion Fund.
During 2019-20, an amount of Rs. 2.34 crore was released to various banks for various Financial Inclusion initiatives including conduct of Financial and Digital Literacy Camps in rural areas and deployment of micro ATMs, PoS devices, Mobile vans with ATMs.
Selvaraj said the target for 2020-21 on the grant support to banks under Financial Inclusion Fund was Rs. 8.62 crore of which around 40 per cent has already been sanctioned during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and Rs 91 lakh has been released.