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Andhra Bank board meet to decide on voluntary retirement scheme
Charanjit Ahuja
Chandigarh, Nov 7: The board of Andhra Bank is meeting on November 13 and a decision to introduce a voluntary retirement scheme (VRS) is likely to be taken then. Andhra Bank's chairman and managing director B Vasanthan, who was in Chandigarh in connection with the opening of the bank's Panchkula branch, said that the VRS would be in tune with the IBA scheme. The bank, at present, has a strength of 14,400 people out of which about 2,000 are considered surplus. Mr Vasanthan said that as the scheme was very attractive, he hoped that employee response to it would be good and the bank would have to use its discretion to offer the VRS to about 2,000 employees only.He said that the scheme may be launched from December 1 and may end on December 31, 2000. Andhra Bank, he said, once used to be the number one bank and a pioneer in the credit card business but mounting NPAs because of its credit card operations had made the bank change its strategy. However, it was now in talks with some companies and a study report by Arthur Andersen was almost complete. It would now be a matter of time before Andhra Bank entered the credit card business once again with a bang, he said. In reply to another question, he said that out of the bank's 1,020 branches, as many as 99 were making losses. He, however, claimed that NPA levels had come down and gross NPAs as a percentage to gross advances and net NPAs as a percentage to net advances stood at 7.83 and 3.47 per cent respectively at the end of March 2000. As such, the bank ranked number three among all public sector banks for its lowest percentage of net NPAs. Copyright © 2000 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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