Banking With Full Communication Lockdown: Travails And Risks Bankers Face

Chasing down the staffers, giving in to unusual demands and even paying the cost of defiance at times, bankers in the restive Kashmir Valley have been going through a tumultuous time since the complete lockdown, while ensuring “skeletal” operations.

Officials hailing from outside the Valley were pulled out in the days leading to the Centre’s mega moves in Jammu & Kashmir on August 5. There were ominous signs of the lurking danger, but there was no information about what was in the offing and the gigantic nature of the lockdown. After an overnight lockdown of the entire state, the Centre abrogated Articles 370 and 35A which gave the state a distinct identity and special powers and simultaneously decided to bifurcate J&K into two Union territories.

“For the first three-four days after August 5, our operations were fully shut. Curfew was clamped across the Valley. In the past month, we had just skeletal operations in many parts, while some branches in sensitive areas remain shut,” a senior banker looking after the operations for a top lender visiting this town told PTI.

The curse of modern banking is its reliance on communications, a luxury for the region’s 90 lakh residents, and also banks and bankers, who had to resort to crude and sometimes very ingenious ways of working around this impediment, he says.

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