Mumbai: State Bank of India (SBI), the country’s largest bank is arranging plans to blow up its rural business and establish an individual unit for the same by 2010.

This was the main objective at the three-day meeting of the bank’s senior functionaries being held at Mumbai.
A SBI official said the plan is to have a vertical split of the bank’s structural arrangement into rural and metro-urban.

The bank’s rural network also provides products including personal and home loans, whilst metro-urban arms would provide agricultural products together with other products.

The official signalized that there is a great scope for such products even in urbanized regions as big business organizations like Bharti, Reliance, ITC and others are getting into agriculture and allied businesses.

The official added that it is not clear, whether the separate unit for rural would be a subsidiary company or a new bank corresponding to SBI. But it would be within the SBI umbrella. To make the most of the developing agriculture business in the country, SBI has been focusing on the

In order to take advantage of the growing agriculture business in India, SBI has been focusing on the sector in a big way.

It had established the agriculture business unit, chaired by a Deputy Managing Director in March 2004. Agricultural advancements arose more than 30 per cent in 2006-07 and even in the first three months of the existing fiscal (2007-08).

In 2006-07, the bank’s agricultural advances developed by 33.02 per cent to Rs 34,993 crore (Rs 26,305 crore) and in the first quarter ‘07-‘08, to Rs 36,922 core (Rs 28,356 crore), a growth of 30.21 per cent.