THROUGH a statement issued from New Delhi on March 7, 2014, the Bank Employees Federation of India (BEFI) has taken exception to a recent press report, quoting the union finance minister, P Chidambaram, as saying that the profits of banks are not for employees’ wages only. The BEFI said such tirade against employees are very natural because it is the employees who have, through relentless struggles including strike actions since the onset of the neo-liberal economic reforms regime, made the successive governments at the centre go slow on their agenda for the so-called reforms of the banking sector. The statement issued by BEFI general secretary Pradip Biswas also referred to certain recent developments in the banking sector in India. It pointed out that the latest available published accounts reveal that during the year ending March 31, 2013, public sector banks earned a net profit of over Rs 50,583 crore even after providing for more than Rs 72,114 crore mainly for bad loans. Indeed, Mr Chidambaram himself is reported (Business Line, Kolkata edition, March 6, 2014) to have told a quarterly performance review meeting with the chief executive officers (CEOs) of the public sector banks (PSBs) that the bad loans in the latter had risen by a whopping 28.5 percent over the last six months, i.e. from September 2012 to March 2013 --- from Rs 1.83 lakh crore to a staggering Rs 2.36 lakh crore.  Indeed, both print and electronic media are today shouting over the declining financial health of the United Bank of India (UBI) because of the sudden increase of its bad loans, euphemistically called “non-performing assets” (NPA), from Rs 2,902 crore in December 2012 to Rs 8,546 crore in December 2013. However, it is universal knowledge that a bank’s business normally entails some amount of bad loans. But, as the BEFI and other federations of bank employees have pointed out umpteen times, the astronomical rise in the NPAs over the last two decades is a direct product of the unholy nexus between the corporate houses, top echelons of bank managements and their political bosses at the centre. Even Mr Chidambaram is also reported to have confessed in the said meeting of the CEOs that the NPAs are high in case of the large corporate accounts. In an article jointly authored by Professors C P Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh (Business Line, October 29, 2012), it was disclosed that in 2010 “the banks had got together and under the corporate debt restructuring scheme of the Reserve Bank of India restructured debt to the tune of Rs 7,720 crore owed by Kingfisher. Now, with the debt of the airline having increased by another Rs 1,000 crore or so, the airline has been forced to suspend operations with no hope of repaying the banks unless the impossible happens.”   The BEFI statement further said perhaps Mr Chidambaram and his ilk think that the profits of the PSBs are for being siphoned out through the NPAs and the “debt restructuring” channels to fill up the coffers of the corporate houses forming a part of the nexus. It is therefore of utmost importance that the said unholy nexus must be busted and the culprits booked if the PSBs are to regain their rightful robust financial health. Leaving apart for the NPAs, however, the PSBs are miles ahead, compared to the private sector banks, Indian and foreign, measured in terms of all other business and commercial parameters. The quantum of business per employee in the last fiscal was Rs 14.22 crore for the PSBs as against Rs 9.4 crore for the private banks. The State Bank of India and its associate banks netted an incremental deposit of Rs 3.8 lakh crore in the last two years which is equal to the total garnered by all the 20 private sector banks put together. On the qualitative side, as per a recent report of the RBI itself with regard to complaints of banks’ clients received by the banking ombudsman, the number of complaints made by customers per branch of a bank was 0.69 for PSBs, 2.35 in case of Indian private sector banks and 22.34 in case of foreign banks, as on March 31, 2012.  From this it can very well be concluded that the performance of the PSBs is far superior to that of private banks or foreign banks. But the irony of the situation is that the UPA government has been doing all it could to benefit the corporate houses. The desperation of the government to allow corporate houses to open banks and thereby weaken the domain of public sector banking is also manifest in the recent statement of the union finance minister that the government could go in for issuing licenses even after the election schedule had been announced. It was in such a situation that, meeting in Bangaluru on March 7 and 8, the office bearers and central committee members of the took stock of the latest developments in the banking industry and decided on the future course of the movement, independently as also under the banner of the United Forum of Bank Unions (UFBU). Bank employees and officers have jointly organised a series of struggles during the last more than two decades in defence of the public sector banking and it was because of these struggles that Indian economy did not have much impact of the global financial crisis of 2008. The government is, however, reluctant to learn any lesson from this experience and has been contemplating to hand over the control of banking system to those who have looted the banks. On March 8, the two-day second national convention of bank women opened in Bangaluru. Around 300 women delegates participated in this national event which deliberated with priority the growing incidents of atrocities on women and other issues relating to women. The convention was inaugurated by Justice H N Nagamohan Das while the chief guest was A R Sindhu, national secretary of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) and the inaugural session was presided over by J Guria, vice president of the BEFI.