Five PSU banks are headless but SBI gets fourth MD

AT A time, when as many as five public sector banks headless but the government has appointed Rajnish Kumar as the fourth managing director of the State Bank of India.

Bank of Baroda, Canara Bank, Punjab National Bank, Bank of India and IDBI Bank are without any MD or CEO.

Close to 50 candidates are in the race for the MD & CEO posts in five banks.

The BoB, Canara Bank and PNB have been functioning without a chairman for some months now. Bank of India CMD VR Iyer will retire by the...

end of May. IDBI Bank CMD post will fall vacant in June.

The number of candidates applying for the top posts has increased after the government relaxed the maximum age from 55 to 57.

Earlier, the Narendra Modi-led government, that has completed one year in office, had cancelled the appointment of candidates selected during the UPA regime.

Four deputy managing directors of SBI group had appeared for interviews for one post of managing director of SBI in the month of December last year.

The post was lying vacant after the retirement of A Krishna Kumar in November last year. Others who had appeared for the interview included Praveen Kumar Gupta, SBI’s chief financial officer, NK Chari, head of medium corporate group at SBI, and S A Ramesh Rangan, MD at State Bank of Patiala.

For the post of fourth MD, four deputy managing directors of SBI group had appeared for interviews in December last year. The interviews were conducted by three sub-committees.

At a time when the rising amount of NPAs is fast becoming a matter of concern for the PSBs, banks functing headless often suffer from taking any bold decision.

Meanwhile, finance minister Arun Jaitley on May 26 said non performing assets of public sector banks would come down gradually over the next two-three quarters. "When we came to power, the ratio of NPAs of public sector banks was 6 per cent. Ideally, it should be 2 to 2.5 per cent. Banks are still struggling to come out of this situation. Now, in the quarter ended March 31, it came down to 5.2 per cent, which was 5.84 per cent at the beginning of quarter," he told reporters in Ahmedabad.