Mangaluru-based Bankers Institute of Rural Development (BIRD) of the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) plans to offer training to stakeholders in emerging sectors, including cyber security, green banking, insolvency and bankruptcy code.
Institute’s joint director K. Lakshminarayanan told reporters here that the institute, catering to stakeholders from southern Indian States and Maharashtra and Goa, imparted training to 3,140 professionals from banks, government and NGOs during 2017-18 through 119 programmes. Since its inception in 1984, the institute has trained more than 60,000 stakeholders from across the country.
120 programmes
Having plans to conduct at least 120 training programmes this fiscal, the institute aims to promote green banking to drive investments in climate-friendly and green projects. BIRD, which organised seven training programmes last year to give push to digital banking, has plans to digitise bank accounts of 23 lakh of self-help groups across the country during this year, he said.
Mr. Lakshminarayanan said that BIRD is also focussing on alleviating the standard of living of farmers as 85 % of them are small and marginal and are exposed to multiple risks and vulnerability.
NABARD and the Union government are giving push to establishing farmer producer companies or farmer producer organisations to provide access to technologies, credit and market. BIRD conducted three programmes for CEOs of these farmer producer organisations and banks for value chain financing of farmer producer organisations, he noted.
To attract youth
At the same time, NABARD and BIRD are actively working towards plans to retaining and attracting youth in agriculture by making it attractive.
BIRD had organised a round-table conference last year in this regard and suggestions were sent to the government to take further action at the national level.
This year’s programmes would cover micro finance and livelihoods; financial inclusion and financial literacy; project finance, augmenting investment credit for capital formation in agriculture.
Besides, BIRD would also focus on climate change, data analytics, forensic accounting and auditing. The institute would also graduate to the quality standards of ISO 9001:2015 from ISO 9001:2008.
