Uti Plans To Cut Flab, Board Meet On Vrs Today

Unit Trust of India (UTI) is planning to trim flab and make it a lean organisation. The mutual fund behemoth will have a preliminary discussion on a proposal to introduce a voluntary retirement scheme (VRS) at its board meeting tomorrow.

Chairman M Damodaran said there is no agenda on the proposed VRS but the board will discuss the issue. "The objective is to make the organisation lean. We are not hugely over-staffed but there could be a VRS to cut the flab. No decision has yet been taken in this regard," Damodarn told Business Standard. UTI has a employee base of 2,500 spread across 54 offices in the country.

Tomorrow's board meeting will also take up the report of the corporate repositioning panel, headed by YH Malegam. "It will take time to discuss the report. No decision can be taken at the tomorrow's board meeting," Damodaran said.

UTI has recently reshuffled portfolios of senior executives and transferred some of them out of the headquarters to zonal offices. Only two of the six of its eight executive directors are with the organisation now. Among the rest, two have been suspended (one of them died) and others have either retired or sought premature retirement. The senior most executive director KG Vassal has been shifted to UTI Institute of Capital Markets.

IDBI, the chief promoter of UTI, is in the look out for a suitable candidate to fill in the post of the executive trustee which has been lying vacant for quite sometime now.