Central Bank Sets Up Panel To Study Vrs Impact

The Mumbai-headquartered Central Bank of India has set up an in-house manpower assessment committee to study the impact of the recent voluntary retirement scheme (VRS) on its functioning.

Central Bank is the second public sector bank, after the State Bank of India, which has appointed the National Institute of Bank Management for the purpose, to undertake VRS impact assessment.

The committee, which comprises three officials from the management and three representatives from the unions, will study the staffing pattern in similarly placed banks and the strategies they adopted to overcome the challenges in the post-VRS scenario. Nearly 7,300 employees of the bank, including 3,800 officers, took VRS which concluded on March 31.

The panel is to submit a report in about a month to the chairman and managing director. The report would deal with the staff position at the branches and administrative offices. It will suggest measures to tackle problems with the customer service, which took a hit at some of the branches due to staff deficit after the VRS, how to deal with the complaints, classify branches according to their core functioning -- whether it is a deposit-taking branch or a credit branch or a mixture of both and also whether a branch is computerised or non-computerised -- and accordingly draw up an optimal staffing programme.

Like other public sector banks, the functioning of some of the branches of the Central Bank were affected due the implementation of VRS.

"The basic problem with public sector banks is that there is no one-to-one correlation between an employee's skill sets and his job profile. This leads to a conflict of interest and hence inefficiencies creep into a branch's functioning that ultimately gets reflected on the bank. The need of the hour is to identify an employee's core competence, and accordingly train and assign him a job," a senior official handling personnel department with a public sector bank said.