Even as there are reports of people dying after waiting long hours at queues to get their currency exchanged, there are very few reports about the condition of the bankers, who have been working tirelessly since the demonetisation move was announced.
D Thomas Franco, senior vice president of All India Bank Officers Confederation which represents over 2.5 lakh senior officers from all nationalised, old-generation private sector, cooperative and regional rural banks in India has said that 11 bank officers have died in the last 12 days due to stress.
The demonetisation drive has taken a severe toll on bank employees' health. On Friday, a 46-year-old bank official, working in SBI, in the Nellore district of Andhra Pradesh died after collapsing, amid a rush of customers looking to exchange scrapped high-value currency.
The leader of India's largest confederation of bank officers now wants RBI governor Urjit Patel to resign for causing havoc in the economy, reports Indian Express.
Franco said while Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley are not economists, there are people in the RBI who understand the economy to advice them. However, they failed too.
"The present governor has utterly failed in his role by taking a crucial economic decision without planning, which has brought havoc to the nation's economy and lives of the majority," he told Indian Express.
Franco, in fact, raised a lot of relevant questions about the demonetisation move.
What prevented them from printing of Rs 500 notes? Why did they not relaise that Rs 2,000 notes are smaller than the old Rs 1,000, forcing the bank system to recalibrate two lakh ATMs? Why are they not allowing cooperative banks, that serves a large part of the rural population, to exchange currency?
"Those who sat and rolled out the demonetisation drive didn't have a basic idea about how the Indian economy works and transactions happen," he said.
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