Letters: Interference in PSBs

Apropos "Robbing Peter" (February 13), taxpayer money is being used to bail public sector banks out of their turmoil caused by the piling up of bad loans. The writer has outlined only the pitfalls of Indian banks after their nationalisation. It is true that the turmoil in the public sector banks (PSBs) is alarming. However, it's not their employees or those of banking regulator Reserve Bank of India who are to be blamed for this. Rather, the policies and practices of the largest stakeholder in the banks - the government - are to be blamed, besides day-to-day interference in their functioning. Be it sanctioning or restructuring of loans to the high and mighty corporates or doling out subsidised loans to the masses in the form of political sops, from selection and appointments of chief executives in these banks to setting up of impractical and unviable targets for financial inclusion activities, government interference is omnipresent in PSBs and it has only become more pronounced.

In spite of all these shortcomings, Indian PSBs have stood the test of time, moving from "class banking to mass banking" and standing tall even in the midst of a global economic slowdown. Today, implementation of any social sector scheme by the government invariably involves the participation and contribution of banks. Be it opening lakhs of bank accounts of students, NREGA workers, Direct Benefit Transfer beneficiaries and pensioners or for crediting funds of scholarships and many others, the government has more trust in the practices and employees of banks than its own departments.

Why can't there be made a norm in every department and public sector undertaking, whereby government business is mandatorily given to any PSB? In all these PSBs, there are inter-zone, inter-branch (within zone) and inter-employee competitions (within a branch). There is a need to change the way the PSBs are manhandled by the political class because even placing private sector executives at the helm doesn't seem to have yielded any positive outcome as a result of unthinking interference to achieve political ends.

Sagar Soni Gandhinagar

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