It's business as usual as SBI staff resume duties

Rs 2,00,000 crore worth of cheques awaiting clearance.

Over 9,000 branches of State Bank of India (SBI) opened today amid chaotic scenes as employees got back to work after a week-long strike.

Clearing of pending cheques worth more than Rs 2 lakh crore weighed heavily on the minds of two lakh-plus employees, who vowed to work overtime to clear the backlog and bring back normalcy to operations.

Managing Director T S Bhattacharya said all SBI branches would remain open till midnight tonight or till the last customer left. "The branches will also be kept open for public tomorrow in most of the places despite it being a holiday on account of Mahavir Jayanti," he said.

Bhattacharya said almost 99 per cent of the bank's ATMs were functioning with adequate cash filled in. About 50 of its 5,600 ATMs, which had been suffering from some technical snag, were still not made operational.

SBI controls over 20 per cent of the domestic banking sector, and the strike has caused hardships to its 100 million customers.

Embasies of foreign governments also suffered as they could not receive monthly monies sent by their governments. The MD claimed the bank had not lost any major business from state governments or corporations.

"Had the strike continued this week, our business would have affected substantially. There were, of course, opportunity losses, which cannot be quantified," he said.

Serpentine queues in front of counters was a common sight at almost all SBI branches across the country, with many having to wait for hours to get their transactions done. SBI employees had resorted to indefinite strike on April 3, demanding increase in pension payment.

The employees called off the strike yesterday after a settlement brokered by the finance ministry was reached. The bank will now pay as pension 50 per cent of the monthly basic salary of up to Rs 21,040. Earlier, the amount was Rs 8,500. Beyond Rs 21,040, it will be 40 per cent of the basic which will be paid as pension.

The annual pension outgo on account of the settlement will increase to Rs 450 crore from Rs 300 crore. SBI award staff will gain more than the officer staff with the new cut-off of Rs 21,040, which is the highest basic pay for non-officer staff members.

The employees, who retired before November 1997, will enjoy no benefits because of the change in the cut-off year, which is now based on the 1997 salary levels.

For instance, former SBI Chairman A Kakodkar will get nearly the same pension as before, but substantially lower than non-officer staffers, who retired in the last couple of years.

The pension corpus of SBI has touched Rs 10,000 crore with it having contributed over Rs 1,700 crore in 2004-05 and 2005-06 .