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Bank unions throughout India will go on a two-day nationwide strike from March 16 to 17 in protest against the plan of the government to privatise some Public Sector Banks(PSBs). The government will discuss the merger of two public sector banks and then put them up for privatization. It will be decided after taking into account performance of the Q4 (Jan- March 2021) and Q1 of FY22 ( April to June 2021) after consultation with the RBI. According to sources, ff required, the PSBs can be merged before privatisation. Media reports said the four banks on the shortlist are Bank of Maharashtra, Bank of India, Indian Overseas Bank and the Central Bank of India. Two of those banks will be selected for sale in the 2021\/2022 financial year which begins in April, the officials said. The actual privatisation process may take 5-6 months to start. It would be the first time in the history of Indian banking that a public sector bank is being privatised. Public Sector Banks grew rapidly after the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, nationalised the banking sector in 1969. The Modi government has been on a bank merger spree since 2014 when Kotak Mahindra Bank and ING Vysya Bank merged. In 2017, the country’s largest public lender – the State Bank of India took over five of its associates and Bharatiya Mahila Bank. In 2019 Bank of Baroda, Vijaya Bank, and Dena Bank merged to Bank of Baroda.In 2020, ten Public Sector Banks(PSBs) – Oriental Bank of Commerce (OBC) and United Bank of India (UBI) were merged with Punjab National Bank (PNB); Syndicate Bank merged with Canara Bank; Allahabad Bank with the Indian Bank and Andhra Bank and Corporation Bank merged with Union Bank of India. The total number of PSBs in India has come down from 27 banks in 2017 to 12 in 2020. All India Nationalised Banks Officers Federation (AINBOF), among several Bank associations which have called for the strike has said privatisation will lead to increased service charges and put a strain on customers across the board. Private banks work on profit and are disinclined to open branches in rural areas and instead concentrate on urban areas and cities. This will affect the common people as private banks will be out of their reach. Job seekers will also be hit hard as private banks will hire the bare minimum.To privatise a PSB, there has to be a buyer and this is where the catch is, according to baking sources. The buyer has to be from India or a global bank having shares of Indians etc. Which Indian tycoon can afford to buy a PSB, is a moot question. When a bank is sold to a private entity, the government gets back its capital. It means the government will have several lakh crores of money added to its kitty. Huge losses incurred by PSBs are largely due to “interferences” by politicians in power and populist social schemes launched for political gains. To cut down losses, the government has increased service charges and levying various others, while significantly reducing interests on savings and deposits. What privatisation means is a ‘P’ or Profit for the buyer and the government with the ultimate loser being the common people, especially the lower income and those in rural areas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Reverse banking<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[685],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209467\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}