Retired bank employees are waiting for revision of their pension since despite pension corpus of public sector banks growing by Rs. 1.07 lakh crore in just five years.
Report by Kamgar Ekta Committee (KEC) correspondent
Retired bank employees in Kerala have planned to hold a mass hunger strike on19 July 2025 to press for their demand of revising their pension and welfare benefits which have been delayed for over a decade.
The hunger strike is organised by the Joint Forum of Bank Retirees–Kerala (JFBRK). It will take place at Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi, Kozhikode and Kasargod.
JFBRK is a coordination platform of three retiree organisations: the All India Bank Pensioners and Retirees Confederation (AIBPARC), the State Bank of India Pensioners Association (Kerala), and the All Kerala Bank Retirees Forum (AKBRF). Together, they represent over 21,000 bank retirees in the state, cutting across public sector, private sector and regional rural banks.
AIBPARC had submitted its charter of demands to the Indian Banks Association (IBA) in 2012 during the 10th Bipartite Settlement, and again in 2017 during the 11th round.
Their primary demand is the updation of pension for all retired bank employees. While the regulation mandates pension updation using a specified formula, the IBA argues that the formula was never defined in the relevant appendix, making implementation impossible. Retirees rightly say that the responsibility for defining the formula lies with IBA and that the lack of it cannot be used as an excuse to deny the benefit.
They also held multiple protests at national and state levels, including five dharnas at Jantar Mantar in Delhi. In 2017, AIBPARC met officials from the Department of Financial Services (DFS) in the Ministry of Finance in Delhi but that also did not yield any result.
There are sufficient funds to implement pension updation.As per a RTI data, the pension corpus of public sector banks grew by ₹1.07 lakh crore over five years, from ₹3.19 lakh crore in March 2019 to ₹4.27 lakh crore in March 2024. The annual cost of pension updation is estimated to be only Rs. 3,500 crore.
Another major concern of the retirees is the rising group medical insurance premium, which has become unaffordable. The insurance scheme introduced in 2015 was intended to support both serving and retired employees, but retirees allege that IBA unilaterally imposed premium payments on them without government sanction. Retiree organisations now demand that banks bear the full cost of the premium, similar to what is done for working staff.
Another demand is the inclusion of special allowance in calculating superannuation benefits. Although the allowance attracts dearness allowance and is given to all employees irrespective of role, it does not count towards pension.