Banking and Development : Observations in Reforms’ Era

In the context of wide regional disparities emerging in the process of development, the banks have an additional responsibility in India. That responsibility is to enter the under developed regions and to mobilize and channelize resources into local economic activities such that local development is promoted. In this context and using simple descriptive statistics method, this study analyzes the regional disparities in the background and existence of the role of ‘social banking'. The study observes that the regional disparity in terms of per capita net district domestic product exists in spite of the increasing credit distributions to all areas. Surprisingly, this happens even with the consideration of usual socio-economic factors. Therefore, it feels that the future research may explore more on the ‘social banking' addressing regional disparities issues