State Government Defaults Likely To Be Made Public

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Wednesday constituted a working group to operationalise the process of collection and dissemination of data on credit information by the Credit Information Bureau (CIB).

The bureau will look into the large-scale defaults of state governments and decide on whether the data should be widely circulated and published. This is significant as the banking sector has been pitching for making the state government defaults public.

The terms of reference of the group includes: examining the possibility of the CIB performing the role of collecting and disseminating information on the list of suit-filed accounts and defaulters, including wilful defaulters, which is now handled by the RBI, looking into the other aspects of information collection and dissemination, like the extent, periodicity and coverage including the feasibility of supplying such information on-line, to members in the future.

Further the group will also examine the viability of working out a query mode to provide any additional information needed and considered appropriate, on specific requests from members, including particulars relating to directors of defaulting firms, as long as it is legally permissible.

S R Iyer, former State Bank of India managing director and chairman of the CIB, will head the group. Other members of the group include three RBI chief general managers, Usha Thorat (internal debt management cell), K C Bandyopadhyay (financial institutions division and department of banking supervision and K R Ganapathy (department of information technology) and B B Tiwari, joint legal adviser, RBI.

The group also includes Birendra Kumar, deputy managing director and chief credit officer, State Bank of India; M G Bakre, chief general manager, credit recovery department, Industrial Development Bank of India, Rajeev Uberoi, regional head (compliance), Standard Chartered Grindlays Bank Ltd, T R Madhavan, general manager (credit), Bank of India, Kaizad Bharucha, vice-president (credit & market research), HDFC Bank Ltd and K Unnikrishnan, executive (banking operations), Indian Banks' Association, C R Muralidharan, CGM, department of banking operations and development, RBI, will be the member-secretary of the group.

In the October credit policy, the RBI had stated that it would constitute a group, representing the CIB, IBA, select banks and institutions, to operationalise the process of collection and dissemination of the data on credit information by the CIB.