Banking in Bihar

Baijnath Rai has been driving my car for nearly five years and I have got to know a good bit about his family and the issues that bug him. Sending money home by the good old money orders is one of them.

Sometimes it has taken a month or more for the money to reach his home. The postman delayed payments to run his own money-lending business. Baijnath has a bit of a temper and is well-connected locally.

So once, during a visit home when he came to know of the delay, he all but beat up the postman. Thereafter his money orders never got delayed.

But other problems remained. One was the postman took a rupee for every hundred he paid out. If you add the five rupees that it takes to send hundred rupees, then it works out to more than what you will get if you keep the money in a bank for a year.

So I told Baijnath to open a bank account in Bangalore and a joint account with his wife at home. That way, he could send remittances to his own account at a fraction of the money order cost and his wife could draw the money at will.

So I introduced him to my bank, the special retail branch of State Bank of India next to its Bangalore head office. This branch lives up to the reputation of the city and I have been happy the way they use a mixture of IT and personal touch to do their work. But trouble began when Baijnath tried to open an account back home, at State Bank's Bhagbatipur branch in Bihar's Madhubani district.

How do we know who you are, said the branch people, some of whose families have known his family for generations.

Baijnath has worked in Delhi and Bangalore and does not have a local voter's identity card. His attempt to show them the title deeds for his land did not suffice. He was given a piece of paper that required the signatures of a good part of the local who's who -- tehesildar, thanedar and others. He gave up.

After some time his wife got her voter's identity card and so he asked her to go with someone to the branch and open an account. There, she was told that to get everything done smoothly, why doesn't she give Rs 200 for chai pani? She did, and the account was opened. Baijnath fumed when he heard this. The bank employee in question knew him and his family well!

Now that the accounts were in place, I told him to send a mail transfer so his wife wouldn't have to first go and deposit a draft and then draw the money, god knows over how many visits. But I did not know the MT had been consigned to history and since the branch was not electronically connected, he could only send a TT (telegraphic transfer) the old fashioned way, paying Rs 100 extra as TT charges.

Then began the wait. He rang up his village PCO on two successive Sundays to find out that the gentlemen at SBI Bhagbatipur had demanded proof (saboot) that money had been sent. It was my turn to lose my temper.

I called the bigwig at my Bangalore branch, he called up the Bihar branch manager and eventually, after three weeks, Baijnath's wife got paid the proceeds of the TT. There was no error at the Bangalore end. The gentlemen at the SBI branch in Bagbatipur were simply being callous or cussed or both.

Every time I read in the papers that SBI will buy some foreign banks, I wonder, which culture will it export, that of Bangalore or Bhagbatipur?