45 crore Jan Dhan accounts have accumulated Rs 2.1 lakh crore: Anurag Thakur
Feb 16, 2024
New Delhi [India], February 17 : Union Minister Anurag Thakur on Friday inaugurated the 2024 Annual Government and Institutional Business Meet of the Federal Bank and asserted that under the Jan Dhan scheme around 45 crore bank accounts have been opened.
Addressing an audience of the officials and employees of the bank, the Minister at the very outset, congratulated Federal Bank for an all-time high share price.
Recalling the mood when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, Thakur said that a lot of people had rebuffed it as a non-starter.
"But today the government can proudly boast of having opened 45 crore bank accounts under the scheme. The corpus under the Jan Dhan accounts is a mammoth 2.1 lakh crore rupees that is part of the banking ecosystem," he said.
Reminiscing the time before the current government, Thakur said that before 2014 the government was known for policy paralysis. Since 2014, the credo has shifted to Reform, Perform, Transform. The banking sector is today out of the clutches of debt and at an all-time high performance.
The Minister stated that when the country was hurt by economic offenders before 2014, it was the current government that came out with the Economic Offenders Bill and is still fighting cases abroad to get all the offenders back to India. The gross NPA has reduced to 3.2 per cent, and the return on assets has seen a rise from 0.5 per cent to 0.79 per cent in 2023.
He went on to state that a similar mood prevailed when digital payments were promoted by the government after demonetization but today the smallest of payments is being made by BHIM UPI. These are examples that have taken India from Fragile 5 to the top 5 economies of the world and will take the country to 3rd largest economy soon.
Thakur said that the government's efforts, with a mix of accountability and transparency, have brought 25 crore people out of multidimensional poverty in the past ten years and this a proof of people benefiting from Government schemes.
The Government can proudly proclaim that a hundred per cent of government expenditure on social sector schemes is reaching the beneficiaries due to the implementation of the JAM trinity.
The Minister ensured that the government will keep taking bold initiatives and is resolute to take India to the top 3 economies in another five years and a developed country by 2047.
