{"book":"adl0957","page":344,"text":"imports and exports of the country. Generally imports exceeded\nexports, thereby greatly affecting the exchange value of the\nAfghan currency. It was to meet this great demand that King\nMohammed Nadir Shah established (in 1930) a Joint-Stock\nCompany-Shirkat-i-Ashami-the forerunner of the present\nAfghan National Bank. The exchange rate of the currency was\nfixed, private bankings was disallowed, local traders were en-\ncouraged to do all foreign business through the bank and to keep\nthe value of their exports and imports at par. In cases of financial\ndifficulties the bank was to advance money at low interest,\nthus enabling them to withstand a dull market.\n\nFunds were required for launching various development\nschemes to make the country selfsufficient in certain commodities\nfor which it has adequate supply of raw materials or what could\nbe acquired by further development. So the need for establishing\nnew banks and business concerns arose with the development of\nnatural resources and ever increasing demand of the country for\nconsumers' goods.\nAt present Afghanistan has five banks-(1) Da Afghanistan Bank,\n(2) Bank-i-Millie (Afghan National Bank), (3) Pashtanay Tijarati\nBank (Afghan Commercial Bank), (4) Construction Bank, and (5)\nAgriculture and Handicrafts Bank. There are no branches of\nany foreign bank in the country.\nDa Afghanistan Bank founded in 1938 is a Government\nconcern which performs the function of a Central Bank. It is in\nreality the old Government treasury put on modern lines and is\nmainly concerned with issuing currency notes, transacting financial\naffairs of the State and controlling the exchange rate of the\ncurrency.\nThe most important commercial bank in the country is the\nBank-i-Millie, located in Kabul and founded in 1935. It has now","chars":1774,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00344.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/344","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/344","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0957/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0957_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}