From the Joint Director’s Desk

It gives me great pleasure to take over as the Joint Director of BIRD Mangaluru. BIRD-Mangaluru has been conducting capacity building training programmes for Commercial Banks, RRBs, Cooperative Banks, NBFCs as also FPOs, NGOs and other partners, on a spectrum of concepts dealing with Rural Banking, Green Finance, Enterprise, Livelihood Development etc. 

Over the years Rural Financial Institutions have played a very crucial role in promoting economic activities in the country and have evolved from being a source for mere credit purveyance to an instrument of inclusive development. The process has seen bank finance encompass all agriculture, industry, services and business sectors, taking in its fold the financially excluded population, transforming itself from manual operations to digitally driven platforms.   

The fast-developing ecosystem around Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs), Technology based start-ups (AgTech & FinTech) and the importance of Climate Change related risks and the challenges accentuated by COVID-19 requires renewed efforts by FIs, FPOs and other Developmental partners of NABARD in up-skilling the manpower competencies. 

BIRD, Mangaluru, ever since its inception in the year 1984, has been focusing on capacity building of bank officials and other stakeholders in rural development in tandem with the industry requirements, through quality training inputs. We have geared up ourselves to find newer ways of capacity building of human resources by initiating various training programmes considering the fast-changing technology-based ecosystem and developments in rural and agriculture sphere. In addition to regular programmes, BIRD-M will also design specific training programmes to meet the requirements of client banks/other partners.  

I look forward to a fruitful year of innovative and collaborative efforts in this direction. 

Shri V S Balasubramanian