Covid-19 has killed over 1,000 bank employees in India, says union

Banking sector is slotted as an essential service and partially exempt from the lockdown orders, allowing some to call as much as 50% of their workforce in bank branches to avoid any disruption.

Indian banks have lost more than a thousand employees and many more are infected, according to a industry body, underscoring the heavy toll virus has taken in the Asian country battling the world’s worst coronavirus crisis.

“We have lost more than 1,000 colleagues already,” S. Nagarajan, general secretary of the All India Bank Officers’ Association told Bloomberg News over phone on Saturday. “Bank employees are frontline workers and the virus is affecting them.”

With more than 24 million people sickened in India and over 266,200 dead amid the world’s fastest-growing outbreak, bulk of Indian states are in a lockdown with