Banking in India
a brief account of Indian banking
Modern banking in India began in the mid-18th century. Among the first banks were the Bank of Hindustan, which was established in 1770 and liquidated in 1829–32; and the General Bank of India, established in 1786 but failed in 1791.
The largest and the oldest bank which is still in existence is the State Bank of India (SBI). It originated and started working as the Bank of Calcutta in mid-June 1806. In 1809, it was renamed as the Bank of Bengal. This was one of the three banks founded by a presidency government, the other two were the Bank of Bombay in 1840 and the Bank of Madras in 1843. The three banks were merged in 1921 to form the Imperial Bank of India, which upon India's independence, became the State Bank of India in 1955. For many years, the presidency banks had acted as quasi-central banks, as did their successors, until the Reserve Bank of India was established in 1935, under the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934.
In 1960, the State Banks of India was given control of eight state-associated banks under the State Bank of India (Subsidiary Banks) Act, 1959. However the merger of these associated banks with SBI went into effect on 1 April 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “Banking in India” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.