Early day banking
N J Ravi Chander
In mid-1980, I joined the State Bank of India (SBI), Bengaluru main branch, which was reputed to be the first inland branch of the bank. In the pre-mechanised era, the cashier job which I performed was no walk in the park. We carried out accounting tasks without the aid of gadgets and became adept at them. Our fingers and mind worked in sync as we counted bundles of currency notes and totalled lengthy scrolls and registers.
The sprawling premises, with its fir and teak, once housed the British Resident. Interestingly, back then, the branch head was called an agent and the general manager designated as secretary and treasurer! The main branch appeared regal with stately pillars, a high ceiling, a spacious hall, and expansive doors and windows. Most employees cycled to the bank, and only a privileged few possessed motorised vehicles. Old-timers told us that the place once housed a horses’ stable to secure the equines used by the erstwhile Bank of Madras officers.
We used a long rectangular table with ten employees on either side for sorting, counting and bundling the notes before being binned. We learned the ropes here before graduating to the cash counter.
The seniors drilled us on the banknotes’ security features and the subtle difference between a genuine and a fake currency. We honed our counting skills by flicking the edges of a 200-page notebook. Many veterans went through the motions with machine-like speed as the juniors looked on in awe. Some even adopted a different tack, thumbing two notes at a time and finished the task double-quick. Unfortunately, with the advent of note counting machines, manual counting is a forgotten art.
The launch of the Special Bearer Bond Scheme by the Indira Gandhi dispensation in the early 1980s to legitimise black money saw people who hoarded them throng the branch. Customers arrived with suitcases brimming with illegitimate cash to invest in the scheme. As a result, many counterfeit notes came tumbling out, and I discovered fake notes for the first time. The counterfeits were cremated to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands again.
Month ends would witness extra counters to cope with the payday rush. Defence establishments, government departments and public sector units wrote fat cheques, and the large disbursals and book balancing tested one’s nerve. Unfortunately, many senior cashiers played truant on the rush days, forcing the juniors to disburse salaries. Despite being vigilant, cashiers sometimes erred in making short/excess payments and paid for their folly.
My first experience of talking on the landline phone came only after joining the bank when the authorities entrusted me with reporting the daily cash figures to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
In those days, the main branch telephonically confirmed the merged cash figures of all the bank branches in the city to the central bank. Then, a special messenger would wheel down to the RBI, located just around the corner on Residency Road, to deliver the hard copies. The job of reporting the cash figures was a novel experience, but telephone phobia gripped me initially. It took a few days for me to acclimatize and yell out the statistics with confidence!
(The author is a former banker who has taken to writing as a past time. He is a regulator contributor to Kashmir Vision besides writes for various regional and national publications)
