D Thomas Franco, senior vice president of the All India Bank Officers Confederation, has called for the resignation of Reserve Bank of India governor Urjit Patel.
He said that Urjit Patel should take the moral responsibility of the havoc created in country due to unplanned decision of demonetisation, which resulted in the death of more than 55 people in the country including 11 bank officers, reported Indian Express.
The bank officers union represents over 2.5 lakh senior officers from all nationalised, old-generation private sector, co-operative and regional rural banks in India.
According to Franco, as either Prime Minister or Finance Minister is not an economist, the economists in RBI has responsibility to take right decisions on matters relating to people’s lives. He added that the present governor has utterly failed in taking the proper decision.
Franco said the economic growth has been affected and think tanks predicted the immediate impacts will last at least 12 to 15 months.
Franco also cited the example of 1978 demonetisation move, when the RBI governor IG Patel advised against the move proposed by the then government.
Talking about the shortage of 100 rupee notes, he said “What we are getting is mostly soiled notes, reintroduced by RBI because of this crisis. As detection machines reject most of the soiled notes, it is another herculean task for bank officers to sort these out manually. Had there been a little planning, they could have printed Rs 500 and Rs 100 notes instead of printing Rs 2,000 notes.”
Franco alleged that the bank workers were more affected due to this ill-planned move as they were forced to work for 18 hours for 11 consecutive days without even a half day leave.
