THE Bank Employees Federation of India (BEFI), in its office bearers meeting held on December 17, 2017 at Chennai decided to launch a series of struggle programmes to defeat the draconian anti-people FRDI bill and to protect the interests of the depositors.

BEFI has called upon all its state units to collect crores of signatures from the public as part of the campaign launched by the United Forum of Bank Unions to be submitted to the speaker of the Lok Sabha in the budget session of the parliament.

BEFI will conduct street campaigns, demonstrations culminating in a day long dharna in all the state capitals and important district centres on January 24, 2018 demanding scrapping of FRDI bill and protesting against the ill-conceived move of the government of India to merge public sector banks besides opposing all the so-called banking sector reforms initiated by the government of India.

BEFI strongly deplores the statement of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) calling for reduction of government shares to 33 per cent from the present 51 per cent. Privatisation of public sector banks will see the end of priority sector lending leading to impoverishment of the large sections of the Indian masses whose standard of living have been improved for the past  50 years due to nationalisation of private banks and priority sector lending.

Office bearers of BEFI decided to hold demonstrations before the CII offices all over the country.