First week.. Rendezvous with Rural India

On March 10th , I reached Gorakhpur at about 4 AM. I looked around and found a rickshawaala , asking him to show me a cheap hotel where I could rest for the coming few days.

I saw that in most of the hotels people of Nepali origin were working and to my surprise I also saw a few foreigners.Soon I realized that I have come to a place which is only 90 kms something from the India Nepal border.

When I reached to my branch , I was quite frightened by the swarm of crowd that had lined up against the 3 cash counters.I asked for the BM and entered his chamber.Gladly he's a young fellow few years elder then me and welcomed me to SBI. He introduced me to the branch employees and then gave me an overview of the process of banking in SBI.

First day was not of much work but this gave me ample time to absorb the working culture here.I got my salary account created and in the next couple of days got a room at rent .

As my PF ID has not been activated I could not and am still not able to login with my ID. So for most of the time in the first week, I was given the task of updating the ledgers in SBI .Though the banking technology has advanced in leaps and bounds , still few registers are kept for various processes.When I say few , I must say that by conservative guessing , the no. of registers here in a comparatively small branch is more than 1000 and of about 100 different types.

Ours is a scale 2 branch .By scale of the branch we mean that it is run by BM of that scale.In banking taxonomy ,officers are said to be the supervisory staff and the clerks and messengers as award staff.

The first week has not been much about working on system , but I have gained a lot through my interactions with the staff who are very hospitable and keep answering to the simplest of my questions.