• PAGE ONE
• INDEX
• HOME

Vijaya Bank board okays VRS, insurance products sale

Our Bureau

CALCUTTA, Nov. 22

THE board of Vijaya Bank, at its meeting held last week, approved in principle, a voluntary retirement scheme for the employees of the bank.

The board also approved the bank's proposal to sell insurance products, both life and non-life, on behalf of other insurance companies, foreign or joint venture.

Mr S. Gopalakrishnan, Chairman and Managing Director of Vijaya Bank, while briefing newsmen here on its forthcoming IPO, said currently it was having on its roll a little more than 14,000 employees and it would be difficult to indicate right now how many of them would opt for VRS. ``We have not yet done any exercise on that'', he said.

Asked if the VRS should also be accompanied by the closure of branches to prevent probable mismatch, Mr Gopalakrishnan replied that the bank had before it a proposal to convert its rural branches into low-cost deposit mobilisation outfits complete with A TMs. ``The requirement of manpower in such outfits will automatically drop'', he said. Right now, 261 out of a total 861 branches of the bank were located in rural areas.

He felt that the demand for credit in the second half of the current fiscal would remain unchanged at the fist-half level of 12-13 per cent. ``If the current trend is any indication, any significant rise in demand is unlikely''. Even the Centre was appre hensive that the GDP growth might not be as much as estimated earlier.

The percentage of the bank's net NPAs to net advances stood at 6.65 per cent in March 2,000, down from 11.6 per cent in March 1996, 9.6 per cent in March 1997, 7.56 per cent in March 1998 and 6.72 per cent in March 1999.

This, he felt, had been possible because of accent on high quality assets and recovery of past dues. Asked if the bank was not overprovisioning, he said that it was better to do overprovisioning than underprovisioning because in case of contingency, the bank would not be caught unawares. Recovery in the first half of the current financial year had improved significantly, he said.