SBI employees threaten indefinite stir from April 3
Mumbai, Mar 28 (UNI) About 210,000 State Bank of India employees and officers, spanning 9,000 branches across the country, have threatened to launch an indefinite strike from April 3, demanding revision of their pension scheme.
The employees have been forced to resort to the strike because of the lethargy of the management in addressing the long-pending issue of pension scheme which has not been revised since the last fourteen years, All India State Bank Officers' Federation general secretary Shantaraju said here today.
While the pension scheme was revised and updated in the case of the seven associate banks of SBI, it was not revised for the employees of SBI in spite of several representations made to the management, Mr Shantaraju said.
He said the federation had a meeting with the SBI chairman yesterday where it was informed that the management had recommended a 50 per cent revision of the pension scheme, thereby bringing it at par with the industry.
Currently, an official of SBI, having a monthly salary above Rs 25,000, gets a pension of maximum Rs 4,250 only based on the salary-scale of 1992, while the average industry payout to an employee is Rs 18,000 per month, Mr Shantaraju said.
Similarly, in the case of family pension, an employee of SBI gets an amount of Rs 1,000 only as against the industry average payment of Rs 4,800.
In fact, the largest shareholder of SBI, the Reserve Bank of India has given its consent to the revision of the pension scheme.
However, the Finance Ministry is yet to approve the scheme, Mr Shantaraju said.
The members of the federation today staged a day-long demonstration in front of SBI's local headoffice at Bandra-Kurla complex here.
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