First of its kind consultation conducted by OBC, Circle Office, Jalandhar

Jalandhar, August 18, 2019: The first stage of the bottom-up consultative process designed to generate ideas and review performance of branches and their alignment with national priorities, was conducted at the Circle Office, Jalandhar of Oriental Bank of Commerce on 17th and 18th of August, 2019, involving all branches within the Circle’s jurisdiction.

The consultative meeting was attended by all the branch managers & Cluster Heads, was presided over by Alok Goel, Deputy General Manager. The meeting was also attended by Mukul Sahay, Circle Head, Jalandhar.

This was a first of its kind consultation where the branches were themselves asked to review their performance, deliberate on the issue before the banking sector, and ideate on future strategy and the way forward. The meet focused on the ways and means to increase credit to various sectors of the economy, enhance use of technology to bring about innovation and enable big data analytics, and make banking citizen-centric as well as more responsive to the needs and aspirations of senior citizens, farmers, small industrialists, entrepreneurs, youth, students and women.
The following nine thematic papers by domain experts on various challenges facing the banking sector, were discussed during the meet with a view to suggest reforms in Public Sector Banks (PSBs), and the future roadmap for them: Increasing digital payments by Nandan Nilekani; Corporate Governance in PSBs by Uday Kotak; Credit for India’s MSMEs by U. K. Sinha; Use of Technology in PSBs by K. Subramanian; Retail Lending – A Great Opportunity by Aditya Puri; Agriculture Credit by Prof. Ramesh Chand and Dr. H. K. Bhanwala; Export Credit in India by David Rasquenha; Need to Establish Financial Grid by Dr. Charan Singh; Enabling Bank Credit towards a $5 by Soumya Kanti Ghosh.

The meet also reviewed the bank’s performance and its alignment with national priorities in areas such as Credit support for economic growth, Infrastructure/industry, Farm sector and Blue economy, Jal Shakti, MSME sector and MUDRA loans, Education loans, Export credit, Green economy, Swachh Bharat, Financial inclusion and women empowerment, Direct benefit transfers, Less cash/digital economy, Ease of living, Alignment with local priorities, and Corporate social responsibility.

As a result of the consultations, a number of implementable and innovative suggestions came up on how PSBs in general, and our bank in particular, may improve their performance and what the roadmap for the future should be. These suggestions were collated and have been sent to the zonal level for further discussions at the SLBC/State level, along with comparative performance assessment of the branches under each Circle. After the SLBC level, final consultations will be held at the national level to compare both intra and inter-bank performances, and to finalise the suggestions regarding the way ahead for implementation across PSBs.