The Reserve Bank of India is learnt to be restructuring itself in order to streamline operations. According to banking sources, the central bank is in the process of hiving off some divisions into separate units.
The entire supervision activities will be clubbed under a separate arm called Board for Financial Supervision.
The division will have a separate board headed by one of the deputy governors with a separate set of members. This has been planned for better co-ordination among all regulators, sources said.
Similarly, in tune with the limited role of RBI in managing public debt after the introduction of the Government Securities Act and the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget management Act, the central bank plans to hive off the public debt office into a separate entity and transfer some of its staff into managing the activities.
Its division for the payment and settlement system will take care of payments system including the recent technology based systems. A second round of optional employees retirement scheme is being planned over a period of two to three years, banking sources said.
They said the bank needs to restructure its employees in the non-officer category before which it comes out with the scheme.
Therefore, it plans to have frequent internal examinations so as to promote non-officers to the officer category.
This will help in dealing with the lean staff strength in the officer category. According to a rough estimate, at present the total strength of officers involved in policy making is only 600 as against the total RBI staff strength of around 23,000.
The latest scheme needs to be opted equally by all class of employees unlike the last scheme. During the previous retirement plan in 2003, most of the officers opted for the scheme whereas the takers from the non-officer cadre were relatively less, sources said. This has disproportionately increased the burden on the officers, they added.
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