State-run banks’ average salary overtakes that of private peers

The average cost per employee for public sector banks has overtaken that of their private sector peers since FY11—a development that has emerged from data released by RBI on Tuesday. This has prompted RBI to raise issues of productivity. The central bank has warned that public sector banks are losing their cost advantages with per-employee expense of public sector banks today being 150% of their peers in the private sector. The central bank has said that an HR transformation is required to address the issue of lower productivity as there is competition for talented manpower. "The per-employee expenses of public sector banks have gone above that of private sector banks and today, is more than 150% than that of private sector banks. This is despite the fact that pension expenses of PSU banks are not fully reflected in their staff expenses," said K C Chakrabarty, RBI Deputy Governor, while addressing public sector bank chiefs at an HR conference last week. The Deputy Governor came up with numbers which showed that the staff strength of public sector banks had gone down between 1998-99 and 2010-11 due to retirements and voluntary retirement schemes, but that of private sector banks has gone up significantly. Also, PSU banks expanded their employee base to grow operations pan-India in the '80s and a big chunk of their employees are in their 50s and set to retire in the present decade. As against this, private banks have expanded in the last four years and their lower-end staff are in their 20s and middle managers are in mid-30s.........

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