When my daughter cadged five bucks for a packet of chips off me, even as I spoke to some village women about the Government’s small saving programme that they had not connected with, the contrast struck me very hard. Parle biscuits, Haldiram chips, Pass Pass pan masala, Sunsilk shampoo and Wrigley’s chewing gum are all available in the little village corner shop that services the tiny Uttranchal village of Sitla, near Ramgarh. The Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) companies have adjusted to rural spending patterns and tiny packages that cost less than Rs 10 fill the small shops that dot the landscape. But the same village has not heard of the Public Provident Fund (PPF), the National Saving Certificate (NSC) or even the Recurring Deposit (RD) run by the Government of India’s Small Savings Programme and theoretically available at all post offices and State Bank of India (SBI) branches. Theoretically, here, is the operative word, as I was to find out later. The event: a vacation in the hills with a friend who runs a NGO called Chirag in Sitla and during the holiday, he persuades me into taking a short workshop with the women workers of Chirag, who are local women employed by the NGO, on managing money. Coming from Delhi, with banks falling over themselves to offer me door-step, internet and 24 hour banking, this workshop is both about me talking about income and expenditure flows and safe investing options and them telling me about a different Bharat that India does not connect with. Where the nearest bank branch and post office is a 45 minute steep climb up-hill, where the local SBI branch has not had a stock of cheque books for over two months, where no SBI officer wants to come on posting, if they do, they are on leave, pulling strings to get out of this ‘punishment posting’. They tell me about the get-rich-quick schemes that come regularly. One of the workers admitted to being an agent for a pyramid scheme that went bust and she has Rs 3 lakh to pay back to the depositors in the fruit-growing village of Sitla. And I talk about the joys of compound interest. The meeting is spellbound when they hear that the PPF (that carries zero risk of default) will allow them to gather Rs 1.6 lakh if they just deposit Rs 500 a month for 15 years (if the rates stay at 8 per cent, I caution). There is a huge untapped saving potential in the village I find, but they just don’t have the products handy to do it. Some of the women are motivated enough to find out if they can become post office agents and facilitate the process, while earning an income from this themselves. We are all very excited at this new financial empowerment and I leave them threading PPF into a song. After all this build up, five women went to the post office in the next village to open PPF accounts and were told that they would have to go to the post office in Nainital, a few hours bus ride away, to open this account. They then went to the SBI branch and were told to do exactly the same thing. So much for taking financial literacy to Bharat. I feel silly, offering them products that they can’t have. Why? Because the bank is too busy serving an over-served urban customer base and expanding overseas. Because the post office network is inefficient and not a well oiled marketing machine like the FMCG product companies, or the scamsters, who manage to get there and make money. THE STREETS OF LONDON
