Marketing a good cause: SBI to offer loans for cardiac treatments

20 August 2008

Bangalore: Serving a social causes can make sound marketing sense. India's largest bank, State Bank of India, has launched a scheme called ''Hrudaya Suraksha'', as part of a tie-up between with noted cardiac surgeon Dr Devi Prasad Shetty's Bangalore-based Narayana Hrudayalaya, to provide low-interest loans to poor heart patients. (See: King of hearts)

The scheme was launched by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus yesterday.

The scheme benefits SBI to increase its loans portfolio, while ensuring that heart patients need not sink in their life's savings for treating a life-threatening ailment.

Hailed as the first of its kind financial product for heart care in India, SBI will provide loans up to around 80 per cent of the total medical expenditure, or Rs50,000 whichever is lower, at 8.5 per cent per annum.

This scheme has been specially designed so that economically challenged cardiac patients can secure funds needed for treatment at Narayana Hrudayalaya. According to SBI chairman O P Bhat, the scheme is part of a pilot project to evaluate the concept of offering a loan on low-interest terms to people below the poverty line, which includes the substantial chunk of the population earning less than $2 per day.

Narayana Hrudayalaya is a cardiac care hospital that has been conducting heart surgeries that cost around Rs65,000. Therefore, the upper limit of the loan scheme of Rs50,000 falls well within the 80 per cent threshold for the cost of treatment.