India's ICICI bank aims to transform 100 villages into cashless societies

As rural India struggles to cope up with the country’s demonetization push, an Indian bank has come forward to help some transition to a cashless society.

ICICI Bank announced on Monday that it will transform 100 villages into "Digital Villages" over the next 100 days. The move to help villagers comes roughly a year after ICICI successfully turned Akodara, a village in the western state of Gujarat into a cashless village, CEO Chanda Kochhar said during a conference call.

ICICI Bank says it will also make it much easier for people to open a bank account and go about their daily transactions. The financial institution says it will have tablet-based solutions and only need villagers to provide their e-KYC information (as opposed to physical documents) when opening an account. Villagers will be able to pay at stores through an SMS or USSD-based mobile solution.

ICICI Bank said it will provide a month-long vocational training to nearly 10,000 underprivileged villagers, especially women to make them capable of making a good living. ICICI will also extend credit facilities to such people for further help. Any underprivileged villager between the age of 18 to 40 will be eligible to get the training at no charge.

Additionally, ICICI Bank wlll also set up point-of-sale (POS) machines at fertilizer and seed outlets to help farmers pay using a debit card. The bank didn't specify which villages will be transformed, but according to a PTI report, ICICI Bank has already deployed some mobile branches in the states Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and Odisha.