Govt ‘favours’ 10 banks with salary accounts

Ruchika M Khanna
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, June 27

Lakhs of Punjab government employees have been asked to open/shift their salary accounts in 10 banks, including three private banks and state cooperative bank, in case they wanted to continue receiving their salaries and pensions.

The banks being favoured by the state government are the State Bank of India, Punjab National Bank, Punjab and Sind Bank, Central Bank of India, Indian Overseas Bank, United Commercial Bank, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Axis Bank and the State Cooperative Bank. The idea, say officials, is to “restrict the number of banks authorised for credit of payments of emoluments to its employees”.

Interestingly, in terms of bank outreach, banks like Oriental Bank of Commerce, Bank of Baroda and Union Bank of India, are much bigger, but they have not been included in the list of banks favoured by the Punjab Finance Department. Sources in the banking sector have told The Tribune that the decision to restrict the banks and name a few of them for getting salary accounts of the state government has been taken to “reward” those banks who obliged the state government with immediate withdrawal of double salaries credited in the accounts of employees for the month of October. The banks which did not withdraw the second salary, erroneously credited into salary accounts, or who have shown reluctance in the past to bail out the cash-strapped Punjab government, have not been included.

The decision, however, has led to panic among the 3.5 lakh government and 1.5 lakh semi-government employees. Many of them have been account holders in banks other than the recommended ones for the past several years. The representatives of the 10 recommended banks are now thronging various state government departments and buildings to enrol new account holders.

But employees have termed the order as being unfair, saying that vast majority of employees have their various loan accounts linked to the salary accounts. With the salary accounts being restricted to just 10 banks, they would be forced to link their loan accounts to either the new banks, or transfer money to the loan accounts.

‘Move to make coordination easy’ 

Abhinav Trikha, Director, Treasury, and Special Secretary, Expenditure, said the reason for restricting the number of banks for salary accounts was to make coordination with banks easy. “There are four lakh pensioners and we have restricted their pension accounts earlier, which had made coordination easy. We have only repeated the same with the salary account holders,” he said. Trikha denied that the government was “rewarding or punishing banks”.