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Illustration: Paul Daviz |
Arundhati Bhattacharya sweeps into the room at a pace just a notch short of jogging. “It is raining cats and dogs!” she exclaims. “How could you not be happy on a day like this?” It is in fact an unspeakable day in Mumbai, great sheets of rain gusting over Nariman Point off the Arabian Sea, but Bhattacharya has a tendency to see the positives: rain alleviates drought, meaning fewer distressed customers.
It’s useful to be able to see the positives in this job. She has a lot of customers. And staff. And branches. And problems.
State Bank of India, even after having largely frozen new hires for more than a decade so as to shrink by attrition, still has more than 220,000 staff, not counting its associate banks, and will hit 277,000 when those associates are merged; by contrast Apple, the world’s largest company by market capitalization, has just over 100,000 worldwide. SBI operates through 23,000 branches at a group level in India alone, and at times it can seem to be a rare symbol of consistency in a country of unfathomable diversity, which recognizes more than 1,600 languages and 212 tribal groups.
