Kerala - Kochi   

RBI employees plan strike

Kochi: All India Reserve Bank Employees Association general secretary Samir Ghosh has accused the RBI of actively pursuing the policy of privatisation of public sector banks. The RBI was also pressurising the private sector banks to outsource their jobs to private agencies, thus destabilising the banking sector, he said at a press conference here on Saturday.

The RBI had been drastically shedding its staff strength, he said. Its workforce is now less than half of what it was a decade ago. The most affected segment is the clerical cadre of the bank. Their strength had come down from more than 22,000 a decade ago to less than 7,000 now, he said.

The association and its units had been on a sustained fight against the policies of the management. It has decided to go on a countrywide strike in mid January 2008, demanding recruitment of Class III staff and against outsourcing of RBI’s functions to outside agencies.

Mr. Ghosh said the number of employees in RBI Thiruvananthapuram and Kochi had reduced to 535 and 130 from 724 and 206 respectively in 1991.

More than 250 posts had been abolished, according to him. He alleged that the RBI had tried to close down the Kochi office, a move which had met with opposition from the employees.

He also alleged that currency management of the RBI was in a shambles. Though the RBI had installed costly imported machines to replace manual operation of counting, scrutiny and detection of counterfeit, it had virtually done away with the process of scrutiny of currency notes received every day in RBI offices. This had emboldened the counterfeiters of currency to indulge in circulation of fake notes in the country. Contrary to the RBI assurance for steady supply of clean notes to the public, unusable soiled notes pervade the market, he said.

The RBI had decided to outsource the job of clearing operation of five million cheques every day. The Standing Committee on Finance while scrutinising the Bill placed before parliament for the purpose had advised the government to initiate interaction with various parties, but the government had been ignoring the advice.

He said the present complement of the RBI inspection wing was quite inadequate for the supervision of more than 50,000 branches of commercial banks. There had been no inspection of authorised foreign exchange dealers for the past three years, making the country vulnerable to invasion of unauthorised foreign currency.

Public debt management of Central and State governments is the responsibility of the RBI. Now the States are being asked to do the job themselves.

Withdrawal from this function will affect the weaker States, as without RBI guarantee, the bonds will not sell. Disparity between States would widen affecting the federal structure of the nation State, Mr. Ghosh said.

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