Guwahati, April 4: The North East Small Finance Bank has obtained a licence from Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and will start operations next month from here.

The bank has been promoted by the RGVN (Northeast) Micro-finance Ltd, which is the only micro-finance company from the region.

It became operational by taking over the micro-finance portfolio of the credit and savings programme of the Rashtriya Gramin Vikas Nidhi in October 2010.

Rupali Kalita is the managing director of the bank.

"We have already received the RBI's approval to set up 164 branches. We are now aiming to transform ourselves into the first small finance bank from the Northeast, with 164 branch offices, spread across eight states, including the seven northeastern states and Bengal," she told The Telegraph.

Kalita said the RGVN (Northeast) Micro-finance Ltd was set up in 1995 as the RGVN credit-savings programme) and registered as a public limited company in 2008.

"Since our inception we have focused on our mission of providing financial and other support services to the underprivileged sections of society in the Northeast and have been striving hard to improve their quality of life. We registered our first success in 2010, when we received the licence from the RBI. Ever since, there has been no looking back for us as we continued our march towards success by spreading our business over the Northeast, with a network of 136 branches and touching and improving the lives of over 3.74Lakh clients with a portfolio outstanding of approximately Rs 700 crore and accumulative disbursement of Rs 678 crore as on March 31.

She said there would be no competition with other banks owing to a different clientele.

"We will now be better positioned for our mission of working for the uplift of the underprivileged sections of society and ensuring the inclusion of the excluded masses, especially in the Northeast. Our main aim will be to work for the uplift of all such people who have till now been categorised as micro-earners and thus convert them into micro-entrepreneurs, consequently making them also a part of the mainstream banking sector," she added.

She said the bank was stressing on developing a robust IT infrastructure to ensure the smooth functioning of banking processes, a strong policy to guide operations and a dedicated team of professionals to uphold the reputation of the organisation.