Vinson Kurian

West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee has assured employees of the Reserve Bank of India that she would take up the issue of alleged recruitment bias against the Kolkata office of the central bank.

BusinessLine had reported on January 28 that the RBI staff unions had alleged “a systematic effort to downgrade” the office at Kolkata, which once used to be the central bank’s second biggest.

A delegation comprising Samir Ghosh, General Secretary, All-India Reserve Bank Employees’ Association, and Santupada Majumder, Secretary, Reserve Bank Employees’ Association, had met the Chief Minister in Kolkata on Tuesday.

The delegation explained to her the ‘injustice meted out to the unemployed youth of West Bengal’ by sanctioning merely 10 out of the 926 posts recently notified for recruitment on an all-India basis. In the same list, the central office had allocated 419 posts (45 per cent) for Mumbai; 67 for Chennai; 42 for Bhopal; and 37 for Jaipur. Kolkata got the lowest, even fewer than the smallest centre of the bank in Jammu, it was pointed out.

The Chief Minister expressed strong displeasure over the developments and said she would soon write to the RBI Governor and the Union Finance Minister. She would also advise her party MPs to raise the issue in both the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha.

From 2012 till now, the bank has recruited 4,694 Class III staff, of which, the Kolkata got only 6.7 per cent of the total vacancies declared, the Reserve Bank Employees’ Association had said.

The Kolkata office of the RBI looks after the interests of Bengal, Sikkim, and the Union Territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

The central bank had stopped recruitment from 1990, shrinking its size to just one-third, it added.

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