Service Area Approach: A New Horizon for Rural Development

Service area approach is intended to bring about an orderly and planned development of specific villages earmarked as service area for rural and semi-urban branches of Commercial Banks inclusive of Regional Rural Banks. The significant feature of this approach is that stress has been given for credit planning by Bank branches at the grass-root level and their direct involvement in the development of the assigned service area. Since, the Service Area Approach is an important step to involve Commercial Banks/rural Banks in rural development at grass-roots level in planned and coordinated manner, there is an urgent need to find out the impact of this scheme on different sectors of the economy for whose benefit the scheme was planned and implemented. The present investigation is an attempt to evaluate the working of Service Area Approach scheme in non-tribal, semi-tribal and tribal district of Rajasthan.