From the 10th floor of the ICICI Bank building in the Bandra-Kurla Complex in Mumbai, the bank’s managing director and chief executive officer K.V. Kamath can a large expanse of urban India the target set for the bank to borrow from and lend to. But, when we met him recently, Kamath was looking beyond, at tracts of India that have been less visible, even invisible, in the Indian banking story.

If consumer credit was the growth vehicle for banks in the last decade, rural lending will be going forward, he maintains. In the last four years, the bank’s rural portfolio has increased from Rs 6,000 crore to Rs 16,000 crore, and it’s looking to increase it to Rs 30,000 crore. In a wide-ranging interview to Clifford Alvares and Gautam Chikermane, Kamath explains what the bank is doing to make this work.

The India story has suddenly taken off.

The signs were there. Till about 2000, corporate growth was tepid. The knowledge revolution started in 1994-95, but people were sceptical. Still, you could see the momentum building up. From then till about 2000, corporate India grew at 5-6 per cent a year and it restructured. We didn’t know how things would turn out.

That’s why you focused on retail.

That’s when we said we need to change direction and have something to keep us going for the next two years. We saw consumer credit as the opportunity that would give us the momentum. Initially, our consumer credit grew at 50 per cent compounded on a small base. We’ve grown bigger, but our businesses are still growing 35-45 per cent.

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