All India State Bank of Patiala Employees Federation holds its Zonal Convention

Ludhiana, September 4, 2016: All India State Bank of Patiala Employees Federation today held its Zonal Convention at Punjab Trade Centre, Ludhiana. Com.S K Gautam, Joint Secretary, All India Bank Employees Association and Chairman, All India SBOP Employees Federation and Com.Naresh Gaur, General Secretary, AISBOPEF inaugurated the Convention.

Com.S K Gautam congratulated all to make 2nd Sept. 2016 strike a grant success. He further said that the Government has also announced their proposals for merger of PSBs. Already RBI has announced its scheme for granting licenses to corporates and industrial houses. Further RBI has announced their Guidelines on setting up of Small Private Banks and Payment Banks. Thus there is a concerted attempt to hand over our banking sector more and more to private hands. We are already aware of the Government’s continuous attempts to push through their reforms agenda aimed at privatisation of banks, consolidation and merger of Banks, etc. More and more private capital and FDI are being encouraged. Bad loans have increased alarmingly to the extent of Rs. 13 lac crores. Instead of taking tough measures to book the culprits and recover the money, more and more concessions are being given to the defaulters. In the name of ‘cleaning Balance Sheets’, all these huge bad loans are sought to be taken out of public glare to silently write them off. If the loans have been sanctioned wrongly, action should be taken on the concerned Executives. If the borrower has cheated the Banks, criminal action should be taken against the defaulter. Providing for the bad loans, clean-up of Balance Sheet and making the Banks to incur the losses is not the solution to the problem. It is obvious, all these are only diversionary tactics to escape from the accountability for the huge bad loans. Kingfisher Mallya is only the tip of the iceberg. There are many more sharks in the ocean of bad loans in the Banks. Why the list of defaulters is not being published by them? Why criminal action is not taken on the willful corporate defaulters? Why all velvet treatment to them? Why the attempt to convert the bad loans as equity investment in these defaulter companies? Is it the corporate governance and good governance policy of the Government? In IDBI Bank, 10 years ago, about Rs.9000 crores of bad loans were taken out of their books. Now another Rs. 19,000 crores is the bad loan. Instead taking action to recover these bad loans, the Government wants to privatise and sell the Bank to the very same private sector which is responsible for these huge loan default in IDBI Bank.

Merger of Associate Banks with SBI is not going benefit anyone. Already Associate Banks are part and parcel of the SBI group. By this merger, SBI is not going to become a global bank. By performance, Associate Banks are doing far better than SBI itself. In fact, there are many problems within SBI. Nearly Rs. 1 lac crore of loans are bad loans. The priority in SBI is to recover these bad loans. But instead of that, they are trying to close down the Associate Banks and merge these Banks with them in order to grow and become big. This merger is totally unwarranted.

Com. Naresh Gaur while addressing the employees said that already statements are coming out one by one. There are 16,500 Branches in SBI now. There are about 7,500 branches in Associate Banks. Now the news has come out that 30% of the branches after merger will be closed and shut down i.e. 7200 branches will be closed down. There is another news item in the media that because of merger there would be surplus of 13,000 employees. That is why we are opposing these mergers and consolidation.

The Central Government is vigorously pursuing their policies of labour reforms aimed at weakening the labour laws in favour of the capitalists, corporates and employers and to the detriment of working class. These measures are part of their neo-liberal economic policies which are aggravating the problems of the workers and common masses. There are various attempts of the Government to push through banking reform measures in one way or the other. The basic idea is to dilute and dismantle public sector banking and boost up private sector banking. We have been consistently fighting against such machinations. We have been able to build up intensive campaigns, agitations, struggles and strike actions against all these measures. We can also legitimately feel proud that due to all these persistent efforts, the speed with which these reform measures were proposed to be implemented, could not be of such dimension as planned. But we know that the Government is on their heels to somehow get their agenda implemented.

Com. Yadwinder Gupta, General Secretary, SBOP Employees Union (Pb.), Com. Parveen Moudgil, Vice President, Com. Rajesh Sondhi, Org. Secr., All India SBOP Emp. Fedn., Com. Sanmeet Singh, Secretary, SBOP Emp. Union (Pb.), Com. Jasbir Singh, Vice President, Com. Narinder Bansal, Asstt. General Secretary, Com. Rakesh Bajaj, Com. Lalit Mohan Chadda, Organising Secretaries, All India SBOP Emp. Fedn., Com. A K Chhibber, Vice President, Com. Jagan Nath Makhija, Com. Parkash Singh, Organizing Secretaries, Com. Narkesar Rai, Com. Ravi Kamal, Com. Sneha Laxmi, Regional Secretaries, Com. Parveen Grover, Com. Ram Lal, Com. Megh Raj, Com. Shiv Kumar, Com. Rahul Khanna, Com. Vikky Loomba and Com. Amit Sehgal, CC Members State Bank of Patiala Employees Union (Pb.) were present on this occasion.