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The economy may be experiencing a downturn, however the Directorate of Small Savings, Tamil Nadu is witnessing an increased investor confidence. As of September 2002, they have witnessed a growth of approximately 40 percent in terms of net collections. The figures for September 2002 are approximately Rs.760 crores, in comparison to Rs.550 crores collected in September 2001. The gross figure for this year is approximately Rs.2,150 crores in comparison to Rs.1,670 crores last year. The Directorate has taken a series of steps to increase collections.
Intensive data mining has been undertaken. A lot of ground level work has been done to collect data on different categories of investors, from government sectors, the private sector, unorganized sectors, IT
assessees and those who are retiring. This is being done in a systematic fashion to gather figures on all potential investors in Tamil Nadu. Even clubs, NGOs, temples and trusts are being included in the database. They propose to tap the database to ensure that some of their funds, flow into the Small Savings coffer. School children are also being targeted. Apparently the students of Rani Meyyammai School in Chennai saved a total of Rs.1 lakh last year. With the total population of school students being Rs.1.35 crores there is a huge market to be tapped. The
School Recurring deposit scheme has gained popularity in the Southern districts of Tamil Nadu, and the Directorate proposes to make it a mass movement. The Household Recurring Deposit is another scheme that has caught on. In the current year the Directorate has grossed Rs.370 crore from recurring deposits.
Since the bulk of their sales come through agents, they have beefed up the agent network. They have increased their agent network by appointing an additional 5,000 agents, bringing the total number of agents to 22,000. The reviewing system has been shifted from the government departments to the agents. Until now, there was a general distribution of targets leading to unnecessary
load on the government departments. The load has now been directly shifted onto the agents.
The Directorate is spending about 10-11 lakh rupees on Training agents. A further incentive is the attractive awards for agents who perform well. There are awards for agents, postal employees, and government employees. There are awards for individual and bulk investors too, as well as for schools and local bodies. A total of Rs.56 lakh worth of awards are being distributed at the block, district and state level. There are Local Body Incentive Schemes for municipals, corporations and panchayats. Last year a total of Rs.17 crores was distributed under this scheme.
The Directorate has set aside a budget of Rs.3 crores for advertising and publicity in this financial year. They have become more focused on advertising, and this year has seen many innovative and aggressive campaigns. They are advertising in newspapers and television and on inland letters, and through pamphlets and posters. There is extensive van campaigning in each Panchayat. The campaigns seem to have been quite successful considering the increased collections this year. The Directorate plans to launch their own website shortly. They have developed new software to link up all the
districts with the headquarters. The software, christened 'SAMIPPU' is an
acronym for Savings Management and Information Processing Programme and Utility. Through this they hope to give direct information to agents. They are also inaugurating an Interactive Voice Recording
System. Their entire agent database has been computerised and the information is available at Chennai and 5 leading towns in Tamil Nadu. The aim is to bring the agent to the doorstep of the person concerned. October 30th is World Thrift Day and the Directorate proposes to kick off a van campaign to commemorate the day.
With a total of one crore investors in Tamil Nadu, T.K. Ramachandran, Director of Small Savings, is optimistic that the department will witness a healthy growth this year thanks to all the measures they have taken to spread their investor base. Their net target for this year is Rs.2,400 crores. Ramachandran says, "Collections have been improving because we have more investor confidence in
Small Savings".
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