Mumbai: Bank Employees' Union Demands Extra Manpower And Security Amid Ladki Bahin Yojana Rush

Mumbai: The apex body of the bank employees, United Forum of Bank Unions, in a letter to Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, has demanded extra manpower and security to deal with the heavy rush resulting from the state’s ambitious scheme Ladki Bahin Yojana.

The bank branches are flooded with requests for new accounts as well as other work related to the scheme, which is putting additional burden on the staffers, the union has said. The letter, written by the union’s convenor, Devidas Tuljapurkar, raises several issues emanating from the announcement of the scheme.

At present, Aadhaar seeding is yet to be effected for 20% of accounts, whose holders are therefore deprived of the scheme benefits. These account holders are therefore making a beeline for the seeding process and the banks are finding it difficult to cope with the rush, resulting in unpleasant scenes at the counters.

Another point that the forum has raised is that of the Jan Dhan accounts. These accounts have mostly been converted to savings accounts that attract various charges such as SMS services, maintaining a minimum balance, ATM annual maintenance charges, ECS manual return charges, and cheque return charges. On receipt of credit under the Ladki scheme, the bank system has recovered the accumulated unpaid amount against those charges that eventually show less balance in the accounts concerned. Thus the account holders who were expecting the full amount credited by the government are disillusioned.

Some account holders from amongst those beneficiaries are defaulters and thus operations in such accounts are blocked. Subsequently, they are also deprived of the benefits, the letter states.

This is creating unrest among the beneficiaries and leading to chaos. In some places, customers are becoming violent and the counter staff is left alone to face harassment, Tuljapurkar pointed out. The forum has requested for additional manpower to attend to the workload and security measures to regulate the heavy rush.

As reported, the scheme has invited over 1.6 crore applications and the first two instalments have been disbursed to more than 96 lakh beneficiaries.