The national pay commission has recommended that the state-owned banks should not get a separate pay scale until they pull out of the capital slump because of excessive default loans. The commission also expressed doubts whether the state-owned banks will ever be able to recover.
The recommendation and observation came up in the report that the National Pay and Services Commission (NPSC) submitted to the finance minister on Sunday proposing pay revision for government employees and pensioners.
The NPSC also said the various autonomous and semi-autonomous government bodies should not get separate pay scales until they start making profits.
However, the commission agreed that the Bangladesh Bank needs a separate pay scale considering that its area of operation is global in scope.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina approved a separate pay scale for the state-owned banks in November last year, but it could not be implemented because of legal complications, sources said.
Employees of the state-run banks and financial institutions have long been demanding a separate pay structure under banking policies in order to stay competitive in the market alongside the private commercial banks.
The parliamentary watchdog on the Finance Ministry recently recommended a separate pay scale for the central bank and the state-owned Sonali, Janata, Agrani and Rupali Banks.
In the proposal that the PM had signed last year, there were 11 salary grades; the proposed basic pay for the lowest grade was Tk6,000 and Tk55,000 for the highest grade.
Currently, the state-owned banks and financial institutions get their salaries under the existing 20-grade pay scale for government servants.
The NPSC coined a 16-grade pay scale for government employees in the report that it had recently submitted to the government, recommending Tk80,000 as the highest basic pay.
The private commercial banks all have their own salary structures, under which, a top official of one of these banks can get up to Tk14 lakh per month.
The government gave Tk4,100 crore to the four state-owned banks in the last fiscal year to cover their capital shortages created by loan forgery and corruption.
At the end of September, total defaults stood at Tk57,290 crore, which is 11.6% of the total outstanding loans, according to the central bank’s statistics.
Total loan defaults swelled by Tk16,708 crore in the first nine months of this year.
Bangladesh Bank
The commission recommended that the board of directors of the Bangladesh Bank (BB) can implement a separate pay scale by taking permission from the Finance Division. But the number of grades should not be higher or lower than the 16-grade proposed by the commission.
The NPSC report says the staffs of the central bank need a separate pay scale because their activities are directly related with the movement of the country’s economy and also because they work with global financial institutions.
Another reason is that the central bank employees of some of the neighbouring countries get more than what their counterparts here in Bangladesh get, the commission says.
BB and the four state-owned banks have 61,000 staffs in total. Of them 4,958 work for BB, 23,363 for Sonali Bank, 15,146 for Janata Bank, 13,558 for Agrani and Rupali has 4,293 employees.
