PSB staff seek PMO help on pension

Kolkata: Public sector bank employees have knocked at the doors of PM’s Office renewing their long-pending demand for pension update. They have raised the pitch following the government’s decision to clear the pension issues for the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) earlier this year. The employees have been demanding pension update as part of their bipartite wage talks with the Indian Banks’ Association (IBA), which represents bank management, but it has always been turned down.

IBA has pegged the cost of updating pension in PSBs at Rs 95,000 crore and said that banks, which have been under severe stress with mounting bad loans, won’t be able to handle this burden. Pension for PSB employees has not been updated since 1996, union members alleged.

“We seek your help in resolving our pension issues. The basic fact is that pension scheme in PSBs is exactly the same as the RBI pension scheme, with similar rules and regulations,” bank employees union flag bearers said in a letter addressed to Nripendra Misra, principal secretary to the PM. The government had initially refused to budge to RBI employees’ demand, stating contingent effect resulting in similar demands from public sector banks. “But RBI pension has been updated with effect from March 1 this year -- this is our demand also,” they said. The financial cost of updating pension in RBI is Rs 858 crore while the central bank’s pension corpus is about Rs 12,000 crore. Now, RBI pensioners are entitled to get a notional rise of 10 per cent plus dearness allowance with each of the three wage revisions in 2002, 2007 and 2012.