Recruitment Exams of Regional Rural Banks will now be conducted in 13 regional languages

New Delhi: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday announced that the recruitment examination for the Officers Scale-I and Office Assistants (multi-purpose) in Regional Rural Banks (RRBs) will now be conducted in 13 regional languages apart from English and Hindi.

The Finance Minister explained this in a written reply to the Lok Sabha.

The 13 regional languages are — Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Konkani, Malyalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Odiya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

As per records, currently, there are around 45 regional rural banks functioning in the country with total staff strength of 90,000 employees.

The Institute for Banking Personnel Selection (IBPS) conducts Common Recruitment Process (CRP) for recruitment of officers in RRBs in English and Hindi across the country.

“The aim is to provide a level playing field and to expand employment possibilities for local youths,” Sitharaman wrote on Twitter.

It is to be noted that the change shall be implemented from the mains examination of CRP RRB-VIII 8 in 2019 onwards.

The examination for Officer Scale 1 will be conducted on August 3, 4 and 11 and Office Assistant on August 17, 18 and 25.

The issue of conducting bank examinations in regional language was recently raised by G C Chandrasekhar of the Congress through a Zero Hour mention.

He said the Indian Banking Service examination and other recruitment tests should be held in the Kannada language alongside English and Hindi for the convenience of local aspirants.

Responding to concerns raised by G C Chandrasekhar, Sitharaman said MPs from Lok Sabha too had met on the issue which relates to all states which have their own language.

"The matter is of serious concern," Nirmala Sitharaman said earlier.

It may also be mentioned that the Regional Rural Banks(RRBs) are Indian Scheduled Commercial Banks (Government Banks) operating at the regional level in the different States of India. They have been created with a view of serving primarily the rural areas of India with basic banking and financial services. However, RRBs may have branches set up for urban operations and their area of operation may include urban areas too.

The area of operation of RRBs is limited to the area as notified by Government of India covering one or more districts in the State. RRBs also perform a variety of different functions. RRBs perform various functions in the following heads:

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