Union Bank of India withdrew its ₹200-a-day Navratri dress code the day it took effect

Union Bank of India, a state-owned lender, issued a circular for its Chennai staff requiring employees to wear colour-coded dress — nine different colours for the nine days of Navratri, October 7 to 15 — and imposed a ₹200 penalty on employees who did not follow it.

The order met a social-media furore. Madurai MP Su Venkatesan publicly condemned the bank's management, asking under what authority an employer could impose festival dress on its employees, and called the move an intrusion into an individual's right to dress.

The bank withdrew the circular on October 7, the day the code was to take effect. A Union Bank representative said the issue had been rectified and the order reversed.

The bank treated a religious festival as a workplace compliance matter, attaching fines to participation in it.

A state-owned employer dictating festival observance read as an intrusion into personal rights — exactly the frame the MP attacked.

The ₹200 penalty made a symbolic gesture punitive, turning an HR circular into a rights controversy.

Voluntary celebration and compulsory celebration are different products: attach a fine to festival dress and a culture gesture becomes a rights controversy.

The circular was scrapped on October 7, 2021, before the nine-day dress rotation began. The bank framed the withdrawal as a rectification, and the episode ended as a public warning about fusing religious observance with workplace discipline — with the MP's tweet, not the festival, defining the story.