for a full year ending 31 March 2021, Kotak Mahindra Bank had lost 17 employees due to Covid-19. Then came the month of April and the fatalities just shot up as the second wave of coronavirus spread havoc. The bank lost another 17 of its staff in a month’s period, prompting its founder Uday Kotak to say that “saving lives scores over everything else” and the “bank would factor in the risk of Covid 3.0 in its planning”.

The immediate short-term call of the bank is to protect the lives of every single Kotak employee across the country, the managing director and CEO emphasized. The bank has tightened the rules of work and sharply reduced the number of staff manning its branches.

Uday Kotak was candid to admit the impact Covid-19 has had on the business. “I will share with you the kind of pain we have gone through at Kotak with the number of lives lost. For the period April 2020 to March 2021, out of our total 70,000 employees, we lost 17 lives in a period of one year. Between 1 April to 2 May 2021, that is in a period of barely one month, we lost 17 lives,” he said.

“I think we are at such a crucial juncture in the Indian scene at present, that saving lives scores over everything else at this point of time,” he added.

Uday Kotak believes that the Indian economy would bounce back at some point of time and the Covid curve, which is sharply up, would come down, like in the UK, “with that speed by the end of June or early July”.

But he warned against making a mistake, “like many of us in India did, which is declaring victory too early in January 2021 against Covid”, and “we let down our guard as a country”.

“I am permitted to say that we will always factor in, in our planning, a risk of Covid 3.0 and not forget about it the moment we see the economy recover. Covid is the key issue, we need to keep that in mind even as we get out of it,” Kotak cautioned.

In the first week of May after announcing his fourth quarter results, Uday Kotak said: “We have currently taken a call that for the next one week, no person will move out of the home unless he or she is required by law to provide an essentials part of our services or needs to come with prior approval from senior management. And both these are something which we are implementing thoroughly over the next one week.”

“We are taking a view that whether it is sales or collections, that can be done by mobile or digitally. Our employees will not step out and go for collection or sale and meet customers or prospective customers face to face. They are putting their lives at risk as also our customers' lives at risk. And we will monitor this week by week,” he added.