Life beyond SBI: Bhattacharya wants to do PhD in banking

State Bank's first woman chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya retires today, "40 years, one month and two days" after joining the country's largest lender as a probationary officer.
Her journey started at the bank's main branch in Calcutta with large manual ledgers all around. It ends with the bank embracing cloud computing.
"I've seen it all and ensured that SBI is future- proof. And it's been a fantastic journey" is how Bhattacharya describes her long innings.
She wanted to become a journalist -- her school teachers vouched that she was editor-material. She calls her entry into banking an "accident".
But it didn't turn out to be a mishap. She rose to the top, becoming SBI's first woman 'chairman' (laws governing the 214-year-old bank do not provide for the gender-neutral designation 'chairperson').

After leaving her imprint in every department of the bank, she now plans to do a PhD in banking and finance.

For a literature-lover young woman who graduated from Calcutta's Lady Brabourne College in 1977, banking was just a career option for supporting the family following her father's retirement from Bokaro Steel plant as an engineer.
But she had no occasion to regret it. "Life at SBI has really been a fantastic journey, as these 40 years, one month and two days were really fulfilling and I am sure only very few had such a long stint," she told PTI in an exclusive interview on the last day of work.

Her chairmanship began with a massive clean-up of books which saw the bank having red ink all over before the things improved. But unfortunately she leaves the bank not in the pink of health, though a slew of adverse factors beyond her control had largely to do with it.
Two of the biggest challenges she faced were Delhi-mandated merger of five associate banks and the failed Bharatiya Mahalia Bank, and a mountain of bad loans which she inherited. These factors contributed to a great extent to the poor numbers the bank reported in the March and June quarters.
What next? "I am keen to enrol for PhD at the earliest," she said with a smile.

"I was toying with the idea for long. But I'm looking for a thesis-based PhD programme and not coursework-based one, as I won't be able to be a regular student. I'm in touch with some western universities," Bhattacharya said.
"I've seen the bank from a long distance, from the days of huge ledgers to now when everything is on cloud. I'm happy that I've future-proofed the bank. We've come a very long distance," she said.
She doesn't want to brag about headline achievements like the mega merger and digitisation, because by focusing on the big picture, "we often forget little details". Instead, she is happy that she leaves the bank as a highly professional as well as a "very compassionate" organisation.

No other public sector organisation puts so much emphasis on learning as SBI, she said. Also, no other public sector organisation has a chief ethics officer, or boasts of a CSR body such as the SBI Foundation, she pointed out.
"Because I believe that professionalism, learning and compassion are what makes real organisations. There have been a lot of basic changes done within the bank to strengthen it from the bottom up.
"We've really turned around the things," she said, adding the stress was on creating "professionalism amongst everybody, which can't be created unless you create a learning organisation, which is knowledge-based and compassionate".

When she found that many of her women colleagues, who constitute 20 per cent of the workforce, were losing out on career progression due to the inability to take up rural postings because of accommodation issues, she ensured that the bank itself provided accommodation in rural areas.
"This was done to empower our women staff...so that they are well-positioned to take up higher jobs, and they do not fall off the workforce. These are the smaller bits and pieces that we've worked on," Bhattacharya said.
"These little things we've done have created a change and that change you will see as the time goes....we have also done the large things like the merger and going digital. Large things also cause short-term pains, but there will be long-term gains."

Asked if she had any unfinished tasks, she said, "No person can say that I have completed by entire agenda....There are bits and pieces of my agenda that I haven't finished. But the good thing is that in SBI, we work as a team and also the succession is from within, due to which I go with a lot of satisfaction that my unfinished agenda will be finished by the next person who comes in."
On October 7, 2013 Bhattacharya became the first woman chairman of SBI. Before that she had handled as many as 11 areas, starting with the forex wing of the bank in Calcutta, and going on to work in the entire gamut of retail, rural and corporate banking. Before becoming the chairman she was chief finance officer and MD.

As chairman, she got one-year extension last October so as to see through the merger of associate banks.
Married to Pritimoy Bhattacharya, an IIT Kharagpur professor, she has a 23-year-old daughter, Sukrita, who is a student. Post-retirement, Mumbai will continue to be their home.