Bangladesh Bank Governor Dr. Atiur Rahman said the world economy is showing indications of another slowdown due to European debt crisis.

Severe credit crunch from the earlier slowdown still hinders small businesses and the new crisis is in a matured stage in the developed economies like US and UK, he said adding without appropriate policy interventions, their difficulties will be prolonged and worsened further.

Governor said this while addressing the inaugural session of Saarc-Finance seminar on Role of Central Banks in Financial Inclusion as chief guest, organised by Bangladesh Bank at a city hotel yesterday.

Eminent economist and chairman of Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), Professor Dr. Rehman Sobhan attended the seminar as panel discussant.

Senior economic adviser to the governor of Bangladesh Bank, Dr. Hasan Zaman presented the keynote paper at the seminar while senior Bangladesh Bank officials and participants from Saarc countries attended the seminar.

Dr. Rehman Sobhan said more than 15 percent people are still remaining out of mainstream economic activities who have to be included in order to ensure overall economic development.

He said the banks only provide credit facilities to the people who have political and social influences, mainly the poor and deserving people remains deprived, which is unfair and injustice to the common people.

Ensuring development is not possible by keeping a large segment of population out of banking touch, he said adding those people should have to be involved with the economic activities by forming a joint fund through a collective effort.

The marginal people get credit facilities from the small credit lending organisations but they do not get it from institutional financial organisations, he said suggesting the banks to increase coordination with small credit organisations.

Dr Atiur said, BB’s financial inclusion drive has substituted direct lending by corporate social responsibility (CSR) driven financing.

With the guidance of the central bank, all banks are enthusiastically taking up multifaceted initiatives to widen and deepen their financial inclusion, he said. These include extending branch and ATM networks into rural areas, mass scale opening of bank accounts with nominal deposits for poorer people (more than nine million such new accounts opened by now), adopting new cost saving remote delivery modes for financial services like mobile phone/smart card based banking, financing schemes for renewable energy generation projects and so forth, Atiur added.

The Daily Sun/Bangladesh/ 21th Dec 2011