Srinagar, July 23: The Jammu and Kashmir Bank Thursday bagged an award for establishing people-friendly common service centers, popularly called as the Khidmat centers, across the state.
The Minister for Science and Technology, Aga Syed Rohulla, presented the Wisitex ICT Ratan 2010 to the J&K Bank chairman, Dr Haseeb A Drabu at a conference at Hotel Grand Lalit here. The conference was jointly organized by the state government and the major players of IT industry to discuss the role of information technology in e-Governance in Jammu and Kashmir.
 Speaking on the occasion, Dr Drabu said, “Apart from being commercial bank, J&K Bank takes itself as a development financial institution in the state and we have a role beyond banking to provide various kinds of services to the people. We see ourselves as facilitators of providing a large bouquet of services.”
 Thanking the state government for reposing faith in the Bank and allowing it to establish CSCs in the state, he said, “We have already established 440 Khidmat centers so far and by August end the number is expected to reach 660. Our Khidmat model is being appreciated and replicated across the country”.
 Dr Drabu, however, maintained that IT as an enabler of business and our culture industries would give us a far better leverage than technology as an industry itself.  “Our focus must be to explore how to make the industries IT enabled rather than treating it as industry,” he said. “IT can prove to be an effective crisis management tool. Like e-learning courses can be designed to deal with crisis situations which enables the students to learn through e-learning modules.”
 Meanwhile, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in its unique decision has permitted J&K Bank to utilize the services of Khidmat Centres as its Business Correspondents (BC) across the state. Under the Business Correspondent model banking, all basic banking services offered by J&K Bank would be available to the customers at Khidmat Centres.
 “It is an alternative delivery mechanism for financial services which leverages the strength of the existing formal financial channels even as it retains the reach and method of informal finance,” said Dr Haseeb A Drabu.
 Notably, J&K Bank is the only financial institution in the country to implement the National e-governance project of Government of India. Given the intent of central government to merge and implement all the rural development schemes through these Common Service Centres, their number is expected to surge to 4300 by 2013. “In next three to five years we are looking at a scenario in which you will have core banking of the state with the JKB and all other financial services with its subsidiary J&K Bank Financial Services Ltd,” said Drabu. These will include CSC as well. Bank has already purchased a one percent stake in the National e-governance Company.
 A J&K Bank spokesman said the Khidmat Centres were branded in such a way that they looked same everywhere. “It sought applications from aspiring entrepreneurs and got the best of the lot at village level. Selected lot got the design about the kiosk and all the equipments were purchased in bulk thus reducing basic costs. Every unit cost Rs 1.75 lakhs and the entrepreneur had to pay ten percent with 90 percent coming as loan at eight percent payable in six years with moratorium for six months on principal and interest,” he said.

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