A video was shared with me by Maj Naeem Iqbal Khan, showing a long queue of female and elderly customers at Habib Bank Pvt. Ltd, Faizabad Branch Rawalpindi, braving both freezing temperatures and rain with utter disregard of the Bank staff to either their convenience, welfare or health at high risk of pneumonia due to extreme cold.
Dr Amjad Shahani, a reputable Karachi based oncologist reacting to to my share on WhatsApp remarked ” Sir, the Bank Manager is following Sops of covid” . My contention is simple such SOPs are supposed to protect lives and not risk them.
The Bank Manager is supposed to be sensible enough to judge the sensitivity in such emergency and extreme weather and should not allow risking lives of his customers just because he has to follow SOPs to save his job then lives of his customers, on whose money is based his own livelihood and livelihoods of his colleagues, in the entire banking system of the country.
Another well known Islamabad based businessman, Naseem Abbasi, replying to my post, remarked, ” HBL is no doubt one of the worst banks. Every Branch has long queues of poor account holders. This also happened to me in simmering heat in the month of June and after the same process I managed to force my way inside the branch. The merciless staff was doing their job at a snail’s pace in an “Air Conditioned Environment” , heedles of women and elderly people outside, who could die of heat stroke ”
One wonders whether any bank that operates and thrives on the money of its customers could be so insensitive to the convenience of the very people whose money they use to make money for themselves while leaving them out in the cold.
The complaints of common citizens against the bad banking system of the country is endless. Another family friend on condition of anonymity commented ” This is the attitude of maximum banks specially with the pensioners and monthly wages account holders. Its pathetic to see crowds queued up before banks on paydays and benificiaries of the Government Financial Support Programme who are ruthlessly dealt at the banks like beggars with no regard to their human dignity .”
A sad state of the State Bank of Pakistan that is sadly more concerned and occupied with its foremost worry of foreign exchange reserves then correct the pathetic state of its entire banking system that it is supposed to regulate and improve being its core responsibility then accumulate foreign reserves for the state so that it could take more loans while ordinary citizens suffer .