Banking services were set to get impacted for the second day today. Ten lakh bank employees, mostly of public sector banks, went on a two-day strike starting Wednesday. The bank employees went on the strike to press for higher salary hikes. Salary withdrawals from bank branches are likely to get impacted due to the month-end strike. Other banking services like deposits, FD renewals, government treasury operations, money market operations were hit by the strike. Twenty one public sector banks have about 85,000 branches across the country, accounting for 70 per cent of the total banking business in the country.
Many banks, including the country's biggest bank State Bank of India (SBI), had earlier warned that the operations could get impacted due to the strike. Industry chamber Assocham had said the two-day nationwide bank strike may affect customer transactions worth up to Rs 20,000 crore.
Operations at new-generation private banks such as ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank and Axis Bank were however almost normal, barring few activities including cheque clearances.
About 80 per cent of ATMs were dispensing cash till the close of the banking hours on Wednesday.
Some digital banking work was done through electronic systems like RTGS but the functioning of banks' servers was hit, a Reserve Bank of India (RBI) official said.
After several rounds of talks between bank managements and the unions of their employees did not make any headway, the United Forum of Banking Unions (UFBU), an umbrella body of nine bank unions, had called for the two-day strike. They are protesting against proposed wage hike of 2 per cent as against 15 per cent given last time, a top union official said.
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