Matrubhumi (Malayalam Daily) 28.12.2019 Report
Rs 2.4 lakh Crores cloaked in Pension Funds
Pension in banks not revised for past 26 years
M P Suryadas, Kozhikode
The reason banks assign for not revising pension for past 26 years is shortage of funds when the Pension Funds set up in 1993 cloaks Rs.2.4 lakh Crores in them. Even doubling of pension will not affect the corpus in Pension Funds as per information collected by All Kerala Bank Retirees Forum pursuant to RTI Act. The pay out of pension during 2017-18 was Rs.14,800 Crores only when the income of the Pension Fund was to the tune of Rs.18,400 Crores. 75 percent of the annual income of the Corpus is sufficient to pay pension. Out of the 6.91 lakhs pensioners, 1.2 lakhs are family pensioners.
Though salary was revised five times after 1993, Pension has never been revised, though salary was revised five times. In Reserve Bank of India, pension was revised in March, 2019. The information was collected by Shri. K T Babu, President of All Kerala Bank Retirees’ Forum. Banks are to remit to the Pension Fund Corpus 10 percent of the salary of employees. Six banks have not remitted any amount to the Pension Funds during past two years. Provision has also not been made by these banks in the Balance Sheets.
Colossal injustice is meted out by banks by not revising pension. A Chief General Manager retired in 2002 gets a pension lesser than that of his Clerk retired in 2018. Family pensioners are severely hit. They get pension at 15 percent of the pay at the time of retirement when Central Government pensioners are paid 50 percent of the pension as family pension.
Rs.3,445 Crores diversion from Pension Funds
Oriental Bank of Commerce diverted Rs.825 Crores and Rs.2,620 Crores from Pension Fund Corpus 17 Crores from Pension Fund during 2017 and 1018 respectively. Information given by the bank shows that the amounts have not been withdrawn not for paying pension. It is not known how much money had been siphoned by other banks from Pension Funds.
Retired employees may send RTI applications to their respective banks as per format attached in the link. Copy the link and paste it to get tabular format
PENSION FUND DETAILS OF BANKS.docxh
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KrOyNpGlBHviDY71nqbLgxZPjaAjJwSj/view?usp=sharing