There is no doubt that too many bank holidays do affect people, especially small and medium traders. In India, we have a problem with the structure of holidays. Sometimes, we have a Good Friday and then second Saturday, which is holiday for the banks, and then Sunday. So, the bank is closed for three days continuously. The government needs to intervene here and say that banks cannot have holidays for more than two days at a stretch.
Or, they can have at least one branch that is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with people working in shifts. Small-time traders suffer a lot due to the long bank holidays as cheques are held up. Even electronic transactions, such as National Electronic Fund Transfer (NEFT) and Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) are unavailable on holidays, and these businesses fail to meet commitments.
Having said that, though, I must say that now technology has come in very handy and the impact of bank holidays has lessened, and therefore, perhaps, we must look at the issue of bank holidays in a rather different way.
Initially, people were not tech savvy and we not comfortable or rather had fears about using credit and debit cards for online transactions, but that
has changed. Many transactions can be, and these days are done online, minimizing the need for people to go to the bank branch. Now, we are seeing the emergence of digital payment banks such as Paytm and the increasing use of mobile money. Of course, people still don't trust technology-mediated transactions when they are dealing with large sums of money. In any case, all electronic fund transfer methods have caps on the maximum amount that can be transferred per transaction. Over time, however, people's trust will increase and the caps, too, will go. Indeed, already, banks sometimes relax the norms for long-standing customers whose goodwill and business they covet.
While technology has thus changed banking, there are also offline transactions today that do not involve going to the branch. For instance, there are drop boxes for cheques today.
Taking all these into account, one can perhaps argue that banks and bankers could as well enjoy the holidays they get. They do still work five and a half days a week in the normal course. What's more, bank hours have been extended from the earlier 10 am to 2 pm work day to a 10 am to 4 pm work day. Perhaps we should look at the advantages of bank holidays, rather than complain about them - lesser traffic on the roads on those days, and maybe we can even look forward to greater productivity following the holidays.
