Bangalore, Oct 7 (KNN)  Banks are meant not only for corporates and rich people, but also for the common man, said Union finance minister P Chidambaram.
"Banks are meant to serve largely the poor and middle class.  Individual customers need banks more than corporates," he said.

Chidambaram was inaugurating the 101^st branch of the State Bank of Mysore here on Saturday. 

FM insisted that the banks focus more on ordinary people than on corporates and urged them to shift their focus towards the poor and middle class so that corporates are forced to go to the market to raise money.   


"For a long time we have harboured the myth that banks are meant to provide money to rich people and to corporates. Nowhere in the world, other than India, do corporates come to banks for working capital,” he added.
 
Furthermore, Chidambaram also said that the proposed new private banks, awaiting license from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to commence business, should not become clones of existing banks but serve their customers differently.

"We don't want the new banks to look like each other with different mastheads. We want each of them to cater to the needs of a special group of customers who do not have an account in a bank. Each bank must strike out a different path to compete against each other," Chidambaram said. 

He was also optimistic about the growth in the current fiscal in comparison to the last fiscal, despite the current economic slowdown. (KNN/SD)