Mangaluru : Vijaya Bank has initiated the process of financing around 60 start-ups in various sectors.

Addressing presspersons in Mangaluru on Tuesday, Kishore Sansi, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Vijaya Bank, said the bank had plans to finance start-ups on a smaller scale earlier.

“We have received some concrete plans from 60 entrepreneurs. We’ll complete their financing this month itself. Most of them are in Karnataka,” Sansi said.

He said none of the start-ups is from the information technology sector as of now.

Clarifying that these entrepreneurs are not financed under the MUDRA (Micro Units Development and Refinance Agency Bank) scheme of the government, Sansi said the bank has disbursed around 900 crore under MUDRA scheme.

The bank has opened around 12.57 lakh accounts under the Prime Minister’s Jan Dhan Yojana, and garnered a deposit of ₹90.31 crore. He said that only 26 per cent of them are zero-balance accounts. All the other accounts have become operative.

The bank is making serious efforts to bring down its non-performing assets (NPA), from the present 3.98 and 2.84 per cent respectively of gross and net NPAs to less than 3 and 2 per cent by the end of this fiscal.

The bank, which opened 124 branches till now during the current financial year, will open another 84 branches by the end of the fiscal, he said. The bank has a network of 1783 branches in the country.