Banking on A Change: 21 Lakh Tea And Jute Mill Workers’ Salaries Credited To Their Banks

For almost 21 lakh tea and jute mill workers in Assam, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh, demonetisation has been more of a boon. Now their wages will be credited to their banks. Since demonetisation, 80-odd jute mills in India started using the banking channel to transfer fortnightly salaries of the nearly 3.7 lakh workers.

Raghavendra Gupta, chairman of the Indian Jute Mills Association, told BusinessLine: It’s a transformational change…We have already cleared 50 to 60 per cent salaries. The rest will be cleared this week…

Citing remoteness and inadequacy of the banking network as primary reasons, organised tea industry spoke of the difficulty in making cash payments to 12 lakh workers in Assam and five lakh in Bengal.

But a joint initiative of the Assam government and the Centre is set to put an end to the practice. In addition, the Assam government ordered over 800 tea estates to open accounts for all tea workers by 5 December and asked banks to establish ATMs/micro-ATMs in tea-growing regions by 15 December.

The West Bengal government didn’t take such an initiative but banks still held meetings with nearly 300 organised tea producers in the state with a similar mandate.

Azam Monem, chairman of the Indian Tea Association (ITA), welcomed the move saying the tea industry was ready for bank transfer, but added that banks might not find it easy to extend the services in remote areas by the assigned deadline.

With inputs from IANS