[Reader-list] Smokescreen veils banking practices

[faraaz mehmood]

 Nine months before in May 2003 when I stepped into
the air-conditioned expanse of a renowned private
commercial bank little did I know that the well-lit
ambience of the hall was actually blurring dubious &
highly questionable work practices designed to
hoodwink trusting customers & unsuspecting loan
seekers. My bank, lets call it Indian development bank
has nationwide branches & a set of values & mode of
practices entirely in agreement with all the other
national & commercial banks. I was inducted into this
bank as an officer trainee after cooling my heels for
several months with a MBA degree. The procedure of
appointment pleased me & made me hopeful of a bright &
fruitful career ahead. On a hot afternoon I got a
phone call to come to the bank for a meeting with the
branch head. The cashier avinash jain had heard about
me through a friend & got rewarded with a cell phone
for bringing in a prospective employee. The branch
head spoke to the cluster head in jaipur & gave him a
satisfactory report. I left for jaipur the same
evening, appeared for an interview with the cluster
head & the human resources manager who flew from
Bombay for the interview. All this made me belief on
the ever-praising beliefs of liberalization &
privatization. Without a scissor, a clipping, a form
or courier I was on the desk as officer trainee.
Within a week I was on the cashier’s chair assisting
avinash jain with atleast a crore a day. The work
model of my bank demands that the new entrants serve
in the cashier’s cabin for a year or so. I am doing
the same. It took me a fortnight to somewhat get over
the unsettling environment of the cash cubicle. & get
to sleep when I returned to home at 10 in night. As an
officer trainee I am drawing Rs.6000 for a work
schedule of 12 to 14 hours. The disparity can be
judged when the salary of the branch manager, a
36-year-old suave chap is also taken into account: Rs.
71000 per month. But it’s not the disparity in wages
or the burden of unending chores, which bent me down. 
It’s the weird tactics, which pass off as normal
favours every day. After dealing with payments &
receipts till 4 o’clock in the afternoon, the bank
cashier receives daily payments from urban trust,
three telecom companies & the local mandi. We tally
the cash before & after the daily collection from
these agencies. On the third day at the cash desk I
was baffled to find Rs. 2 lakhs & fifty thousand
missing!!  Tally is the crucifix I dread everyday. The
cashier has to pay the deficit & if there is any
surplus then a report is sent against him to the
Bombay headquarters.  I just did not know whom to
report & how to seek help. I even thought of my
mother’s pension benefits because of a premature
retirement on medical grounds. My senior avinash was
eating his cold lunch in the pantry & I had become the
replica of the aspen leaf.  Suddenly the operations
head Mathili bhanawat barged in & inquired about the
tally. Very casually she told me that I couldn’t tally
because she had taken wads worth Rs. 2 lakhs for
prabhakar ji, our most esteemed customer, an HNI (High
Net Worth Individual) she continued with the
explanation that prabhakar ji would send the cheque by
the evening. When I protested she gave me a pitiful
look & asserted that it was a normal practice. When
avinash returned I was less perturbed only Rs. 50,000
had to be accounted for. Avinash sat down to do his
tally. Before he could find his surplus sohan
choudhary (cash assistant) informed me that he had
lent Rs. 50000 from my pie to avinash in Rs. 50 notes.
That night I slept in fits. Sometimes I could recover
the loss in a dream, sometimes I was searching for
them in a nightmare. 					Unconventional methods,
daring practices, highly camouflage rules & conditions
together constitute the work schedule of banks in the
private sector. Banks still promote themselves as a
place of trust & refuge for a secure today & a
promised tomorrow. Not so when you look at the hidden
costs involve. The customer pays fine for
non-maintenance of average quarterly balance,
demanding status of the a/c, slight irregularity in
cheques & demand drafts & non-understanding of
labyrinthine rules & conditions on the loan forms. The
bank is armed with the vernacular indemnity form,
which declares that the sales executive or the
so-called financial consultant has explained
everything to the customer in the local language. The
crowning irony is that the vernacular indemnity form
is itself printed in English with the unsuspecting
customer signing in Hindi. 			I have already created a
blog (www.mumal.blogspot.com) in which I have made
four entries regarding business process outsourcing
alias meagre salaries to 43 off-roll employees
amounting between 6000 & 2000. Only eight officers are
on the payrolls of the bank. My entry on cross selling
speaks of the efforts of the cashier to receive & pay
money all the time cajoling the three hundred persons
in the queue to opt for the moonlight insurance
scheme, personal loans & home loans which the bank
patronizes as a partner. Liberalization enables bank
“to sell” insurance & loans not bothering about the
sanctioning & granting them.  I have also written
about hidden costs the customer pays for operating or
not operating his a/c in our bank. I intend to bring
in the anomalies in the clear light for everyone to
see that the customer has to be on his guard in all
the innocuous daily dealings he does in a bank. Each
bank branch is directed to make its own profits & to
report to the headquarters its raison d’ etre. For
this the headquarter supplies them with an impregnable
armour of rules  & regulations in fine print. I intend
to pierce through this ruthless barrier & report
through my blog entries (www.mumal.blogspot.com) & my
periodical postings 
  
Faraaz mehmood


	
		
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