“Making money transfers work for migrants” ( Business Line , April 27) was a beautiful article containing valuable information. I have seen a large number of migrant labourers from Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh and Orissa who need help from the bank staff to send money to their families in their native villages.

They have bank accounts in their villages but the bank staffers usually do not accept the money, on one pretext or the other. The labourers are sent back from the bank branch because they do not have a bank account there, though they have accounts in another branch of the same bank. It seems the managers refuse to accept the money as they don't want to take the risk.

It would be good if all the nationalised and private banks advise their managers to accept such money for direct deposit into the labourer's account in his village branch, as long as the amount in question is less than, say, Rs 2,000. It will be a great service to such migrant workers and to the economy itself.

S.C. Aggarwal

Pilots' strike

It may be fashionable to criticise the strike of sections of pilots of Nacil. But it is more than three years since the process of merger of both airlines was initiated, and only after the new minister came in was a committee appointed to go into wage integration.

It is a fundamental principle of mergers that the first item to be tackled is integration of services. To say now, after three years, that salary scales cannot be uniform would strike at the very root of the merger idea. If cadres cannot be integrated, why persist with the idea of merger.

Why can't the government abandon the merger process and put the organisations back at square one, to operate in a competitive economy? Or, better still, privatise them? The catch is the government cannot act so boldly because of ‘coalition compulsions', a favourite excuse for non-performance.

S. Subramanyan

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