Shaktikanta Das gets taste of RBI's internal grievance

KOLKATA: A new promotion policy in Reserve Bank of India announced last Friday, two days after Governor Shaktikanta Das took charge, threw the central bank’s iconic Mint Road office into a tizzy, with a majority of the officers striking work.

The new policy makes promotion for junior and middle level managers more stringent. According to the new Bell Curve policy, RBI said 25% of officers in “level B” to “level E” will be put in the lowest performance bracket as against a 10% rule earlier, three persons familiar with the development told ET.

This basically means that these officers will become "non-promotable". Earlier 90% of the officers in “level B” used to get automatic promotion to “level C” after seven years while officers in “level D” used to get promoted to “level E” after five years. Now the ratio will come down to 75%.


“The RBI was working on the promotion policy for quite some time. It was incidental that the order came when a new Governor assumed office,” said a senior RBI official. “A knowledge-based organization such as RBI needs to reward merit and the new policy is a step in that direction,” the official explained.

The Bell Curve was introduced in RBI by former governor Raghuram Rajan. “The Bell Curve system is not always foolproof. It happened many a time in the past that deserving candidates could not be adequately rewarded for three consecutive years as they were forced out to fit others in the Bell Curve,” said another senior official who has direct knowledge of the matter.

Such officers lost another two years as cooling-off period in promotion. RBI did not respond to a mail from ET seeking comments on the issue till press-time.

The officers sat at the lobby throughout the second half of Tuesday at its Mumbai headquarters with a demand to meet the top management, including the governor. The executive director in charge of HR had a brief interaction with the agitators at the fag end of the day, a source said.

"This matter may escalate to the governor’s level as officers are carrying many other long time grievances," they said. The management’s decision to go for lateral recruitment for AGM and above ranks and hiring technical experts on contract basis did not go down well with the officers.

The protest was an impromptu one and was not organised by the employees’ unions, which normally lead any such agitation.

“The governor is new. He needs to be briefed well, if at all he wants to meet the agitators,” one of the officials cited above said.