THE Bank Employees Federation of India (BEFI) has written to Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and State Bank of India Chairperson Arundhati Bhattacharya over its recruitment policy and demanded that necessary changes be made in it so as to ensure that bona fide candidates are not left out of the process. In a letter, BEFI General Secretary Pradip Biswas said an advertisement, issued by the Central Recruitment and Promotion Department of SBI inviting applications for recruitment in the clerical cadre, states that candidates with record of default in repayment of loans/credit card dues and/or against whose name adverse reports of Credit Information Bureau (India) Limited or other external agencies are available are not eligible to apply for the posts. “While we are well aware of, and fully appreciate, the concern for the alarming proportion of NPA severely affecting the financial health of banks, we think that there would be a good number of candidates who have availed education loan from SBI or other banks for acquiring requisite qualification/s necessary to become eligible to get hired by potential employers, including banks. Such borrowers should not be equated and considered at par with ‘wilful defaulters’ in the strict commercial sense of the term. It is very natural that this group of borrowers can start repaying their debts only when gainfully employed. Closing the doors of employment to them would not only put them to hardship but would also adversely affect the prospects of recovering the debts by the concerned lending institutions,” Biswas said. BEFI requested the Finance Minister and the SBI Chairperson to look into the matter and suitably advise the authorities concerned to add an appropriate rider to ensure that the candidates who have availed education loan are not pushed out of the range of consideration for recruitment in SBI or in any other public sector bank.