the goan I network
PANAJI
The All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) on Thursday said that the Central government’s “ill-timed, ill-motivated and quixotic decisions to merge banks” were a prelude to privatisation of the banks.
The AITUC Goa wing is lending support to the All India Bank Employees Association and Bank Employees’ Federation of India, who have jointly given a call for an all India bank strike on October 22. The strike is against the recent decision of the government to merge 10 public sector banks into four banks thus, deciding to close down six important nationalised banks.
“The government’s decision is most unfortunate and totally unwarranted. All the banks who now are facing closures namely Andhra Bank, Allahabad Bank, Syndicate Bank, Corporation Bank, United Bank of India and Oriental Bank of Commerce are well performing banks and have been immensely contributing to our nation’s economic development in their respective geographical areas,” said Christopher Fonseca, the General Secretary of the AITUC Goa branch, via a press release.
“At a time, when the government is talking of including every citizen getting access to these banking sectors through schemes like Jan Dhan Yojana, announcing the merger of 10 banks, which will result in large scale closure of branches and deprive people of banking service, is a most retrograde move of far reaching consequences,” Fonseca went on to say.
The AITUC opined that so far, there was no evidence that previous mergers in SBI, Bank of Baroda, etc have yielded any positive results. As such, this was not the time to experiment with merger of banks when banks were required to play a crucial role in lifting the economy out of its present serious mess and crisis.
Fonseca said that the entire attention of the banks will now shift from efforts to recover the huge bad loans to tackling the problems arising out of mergers. “This appears to be a deliberate move, since the government is unable to take any serious measure to recover the bad loans from the corporate defaulters except through huge write offs, haircuts and concessions to them,” the trade union leader said.
