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Punjab National Bank

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Punjab National Bank

Punjab National Bank, also known as PNB, is an Indian public sector bank based in New Delhi. Founded in May 1894, the bank has 10,189 branches and 11,822 ATMs as of March 2025.

PNB has a banking subsidiary in the UK (PNB International Bank, with seven branches in the UK), as well as branches in Hong Kong, Kowloon, Dubai, and Kabul. It has representative offices in Almaty (Kazakhstan), Dubai (United Arab Emirates), Shanghai (China), Oslo (Norway), and Sydney (Australia). In Bhutan, it owns 51% of Druk PNB Bank, which has five branches. In Nepal, PNB owns 20% of Everest Bank, which has 122 branches. PNB also owns 41.64% of JSC (SB) PNB Bank in Kazakhstan, which has four branches.

Punjab National Bank is a Public Sector Undertakings in India (PSU) working under the Government of India regulated by the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934 and the Banking Regulation Act, 1949. It was registered on 19 May 1894 under the Indian Companies Act, with its office in Anarkali Bazaar, in pre-independent India (present-day Pakistan). The founding board was drawn from different parts of India professing different faiths and of varying backgrounds, with the common objective of creating a truly national bank that would further the economic interest of the country. PNB's founders included several leaders of the Swadeshi movement such as, Dyal Singh Majithia and Lala Harkishen Lal, Lala Lalchand, Kali Prosanna Roy, E. C. Jessawala, Prabhu Dayal, Bakshi Jaishi Ram, and Lala Dholan Dass. Lala Lajpat Rai was actively associated with the management of the Bank in its early years. The board first met on 23 May 1894. The bank opened for business on 12 April 1895 in Lahore.[citation needed]

PNB is the first Indian bank to have been started solely with Indian capital that survives to the present, as the earlier Oudh Commercial Bank, which was established in 1881, failed in 1958.[citation needed]

Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi and the Jalianwala Bagh Committee have held PNB accounts.[non-primary source needed]

In 1900, PNB established its first branch outside Lahore in India. Branches in Karachi and Peshawar followed. The next major event occurred in 1940 when PNB absorbed Bhagwan (or Bhugwan) Dass Bank, which had its head office in Dehra.[citation needed]

At the Partition of India and the creation of Pakistan, PNB lost its premises in Lahore, but continued to operate in Pakistan. Partition forced PNB to close 92 offices in West Pakistan, one-third of its total number of branches, and which held 40% of the total deposits. PNB still maintained a few caretaker branches. On 31 March 1947, even before Partition, PNB had decided to leave Lahore and transfer its registered office to India; it received permission from the Lahore High Court on 20 June 1947, at which time it established a new head office at Under Hill Road, Civil Lines in New Delhi. Lala Yodh Raj was the Chairman of the Bank.[citation needed]

In 1951, PNB acquired the 39 branches of Bharat Bank (est. 1942). Bharat Bank became Bharat Nidhi Ltd. In 1960, PNB again shifted its head office, this time from Calcutta [citation needed] to Delhi. In 1961, PNB acquired Universal Bank of India, which Ramkrishna Dalmia had established in 1938 in Dalmianagar, Bihar. PNB also amalgamated Indo Commercial Bank (est. 1932 by S. N. N. Sankaralinga Iyer) in a rescue. In 1963, The Burmese revolutionary government nationalised PNB's branch in Rangoon (now Yangon). This became People's Bank No. 7. After the Indo-Pak war of 1965, the government of Pakistan seized all the offices in Pakistan of Indian banks in September 1965. PNB also had one or more branches in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).[citation needed]

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