The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has revealed via its last-week-released statistics that the productivity of the employees of Indian banks has seen a notable increase during the last five-year period.

Specifically speaking, the RBI report, titled ‘A profile of banks 2008-09,’ states that the average business and profits per employee for Indian banks has witnessed a more than twofold increase in 2008-09 vis-à-vis the 2004-05 figures.

A rise in the productivity of bank employees also entailed a rise in their compensation – despite the fact that the total employee count for Indian banks underwent a 15 percent increase during the mentioned period, the wages of employees soared by almost 85 percent.

With the Indian banks having registered a 135 percent total business growth – including advances as well as deposits - and 21 percent network growth from 2004-05 to 2008-09, the improvement in the productivity of the employees thus resulted largely from the fact that business growth surpassed the growth in manpower, which increased only by 10 percent.

The RBI data also showed that the public sector caught up with the private sector banks, with the average business per employee figures, as of March 2009, stood at Rs 7.44 crore for both public and private banks. However, contrary to the perception, the productivity of the public sector banks’ employees grew at a much faster pace compared to their private counterparts.