VIJAYAWADA: The demonetisation of high value of currency notes has had a terrible fallout on bank employees themselves, especially on cashiers.
Almost every cashier in every bank is now facing the loss of his or her entire salary for the month, may be even more in some cases, as their registers are not showing that the amounts they took from the vault match with the amounts they have dispensed to customers. A senior bank employee says that cashiers have been psychologically programmed over time to count in 500s and 1000s.
Many cashiers have made mistakes while issuing cash to customers as they are not accustomed to dealing with 2000 rupee notes; they have often counted them as 1000 notes and ended up giving extra money to customers.
Cashiers are being forced to work at great speed to clear the long queues for withdrawals and currency exchanges. They work under enormous pressure and don't have the chance to cross check the amounts they have disbursed.
The fresh batch of cashiers recruited recently in private banks has run into huge deficits. A cashier who joined a private bank four months ago, admitted, on the condition of anonymity, that he had a negative balance of Rs 40,000 on his account and most of his batchmates are facing the same problem.
The public is worried whether it will get salaries or not, but we have lost our salaries completely, said another cashier. The bank deducts the shortfall from the salaries of cashiers.
Vijayawada Bank Employees Coordination Committee secretary K. Nagesh Kumar said not only cashiers are losing their money “we are facing insults every day for no fault of ours. People are turning violent and abusive as we are not able to disburse the minimum amount promised by the government.”
Every cashier is handling a minimum of 800 customers a day as against 200 earlier, he said. “We are working for 12 hours after note ban. It is most unfortunate that the government is making the bank employees scapegoats to hide their failures from the public,” he said.
