Regional Rural Banks have emerged as vibrant financial institutions providing core banking facility to rural people including farmers, rural artisans, industrial labourers and entrepreneurs working at small scale levels. It is a parallel financial institution working with commercial banks as well as cooperative banks in rural and tribal centred areas. These institutions proved instrumental in achieving the target of inclusive and sustainable economic growth. The number of RRBs and their branches has been increasing over a period of time increasing their coverage to the extent of 635 districts of the nation. However in the year 2004 merger of a number of RRBs took place in a planned manner and up till 2013 their number came down to only 64 from 196 in 2004. But interestingly the number of branches of all the RRBs continued to increase and reached at 17865 in 2013 from 14446 in 2004. The main aim of setting up these institutions was to enable the rural people access the banking facility under formal sector and get rid of indigenous bankers and mahajans with respect to deposits and loaning. Government of India has also advocated for extending the sufficient credit to priority sector, i.e. financing to Rural Artisans, SSI, Retail Trade, SHG and Others. In this paper the researcher has made an attempt to comprehend the overall view of RRBs and to examine the structural changes in this sector during the last decade. The study is based on the secondary data availed from various sources. The data have been analysed with the help of percentage, growth, regression, t-test etc.
Performance, Regional, Rural banks in India
