The All India Reserve Bank Employees Association (AIRBEA) has demanded that RBI should stop outsourcing its work as it involves the security of the nation, take suitable measures for ensuring circulation of clean note and start the recruitment at the clerical level, which have been frozen for more than a decade.Addressing mediapersons here after the Central Executive Committee meeting of the AIRBEA , Samir Ghosh, General Secretary, AIRBEA alleged that Reserve Bank of India (RBI) intends to shun all its operational functions and plans to turn it to a skeleton organization. He said, though currency management is one of the statutory responsibilities of the Reserve Bank of India, it is now virtually in shambles. While the manual system has been abandoned, imported machines have miserably failed to cope with the situation.Notes are pilling up in RBI vaults and chest offices, choking the whole system of processing soil notes. To overcome the difficulty, RBI has decided to shred and destroy the soiled notes without proper scrutiny. Absence of a system of close scrutiny may encourage anti-national elements to circulate fake currency notes in the country, he warned.Stating that the decision of the RBI to give up the work of public debt management of states and the central government will put many weaker states under pressure, Ghosh said, the states will find it difficult to sell their bonds if they do not offer higher interest rate. Similarly, the apex bank has not undertaken the scrutiny of unfettered ingress and egress of foreign capital for last three years which is detrimental to the interest of the state. While the RBI says it lacks required manpower for it, it has stopped the recruitment process.Ghosh said, while the Reserve Bank is the regulator of the banking system, risk based supervision system (RBS) is handed over to chartered accountant firms. It is impossible to supervise 50,000 branches of commercial banks with just 1200 staff. Supervision is for name sake only, he alleged.Besides, the Reserve Bank authorities have decided to float a private company to handover the cheque clearing system despite the fact that the Reserve Bank and other banks earn about Rs.350 crore per annum from this clearing system. Importantly, the number of employees in the RBI is shrinking day by day due to freezing of recruitment since last ten years with the clerical cadre being the worst hit. While the total employee of all cadres have declined to 20,000 at present from 33,000 a decade back, the clerical cadre has gone down to 7000 from 16,973 in 1995. In Bhubaneswar office it has also declined from 315 to 141 during this period. In this backdrop the employee union has decided to intensify the agitation under the banner 'Save RBI' in the coming days, he announced.
