Digital has put an end to ‘phone banking’: PM

PM Narendra Modi unveiled digital banking units (DBUs) in 75 districts across the country and said that the economy is as strong as its banking system and the government had taken multiple steps to make the financial system robust since 2014. Modi said that banking has become a tool for good governance and better service delivery.

While maintaining that there had been a shift from ‘phone banking’ – a term the Modi government has coined to describe interference in sanctioning loans to a select few during the UPA tenure – to ‘digital banking’. He said that bankers would earlier receive calls from “the top” and were told how they should function and lend.

“The politics of phone banking had made banks unsafe, put them in a hole, made the economy unstable and led to scams of thousands of crores,” Modi said, while listing steps taken by his administration to clean up the system.