When DFS Secretary Nagaraju played the role of King Vikramaditya

Customer service and excellence are buzzwords in the Indian financial system now. Both the government and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) are writing a new chapter in Indian banking

Legend has it that King Vikramaditya of the Gupta Dynasty frequently disguised himself as a commoner to assess the wellbeing and conditions of his subjects. Recently, the secretary in the Department of Financial Services (DFS), Ministry of Finance, played the role of Vikramaditya to check how banks were serving their customers. Of course, unlike the ruler of Ujjain, he was not in disguise.

 

On April 8, after lunch, M Nagaraju, a 1993-batch Indian Administrative Service officer, left North Block, which houses the finance ministry, and drove down to the Parliament Street branch of a large public-sector bank. Posing as a customer, he wanted to say hello to the branch manager.

 

The secretary was directed to an officer by the head of the branch who was too busy talking on his mobile phone. Even the second banker didn’t care much to talk to him. At that point, Nagaraju politely revealed that he was the boss of the bank’s boss. Even that did not cut the ice, as name-dropping is not uncommon in Delhi culture.

 

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Neither the branch manager, holding the rank of an assistant general manager (AGM), nor the other executive, was willing to talk to the “customer”, who had walked in after office hours. In the public-sector banking industry, an AGM rank is part of the senior management grade, typically a Scale-V officer. Deputy general managers, general managers and chief general managers form the top man­­a­gement grade.