Govt to fully support capital requirements of PSU banks: Sinha

Government will fully support capital requirements of public sector banks so that they meet Basel III global risk norms, which kick in from March 2019, Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha today said here.
"We are working very closely with RBI and banks to ensure all of our PSU banks meet their capital adequacy fully compliant with RBI and Basel III requirements. We are fully there to support our banks," he said on the sidelines of The Economic Times Global Business Summit.
Public sector banks need Rs 1.80 lakh crore to meet Basel III norms. While the government will provide Rs 70,000 crore, the remaining Rs 1.1 lakh crore will have to be raised by banks.

As per the capital infusion road map, PSU banks will get Rs 25,000 crore this fiscal and as well as the next fiscal and Rs 10,000 crore each in 2017-18 and 2018-19.
Out of Rs 25,000 crore set for the current fiscal, the government has infused about Rs 20,088 crore in 13 public sector banks.
On the revision of GDP numbers, Sinha said it is a fairly routine process and reset as better estimates come in.

"As previous years' GDP numbers have also been revised and brought down... It is going to make a difference to current year's numbers as well," he said.

Earlier this week, the government has marginally revised downward the economic growth for 2014-15 to 7.2 per cent, from the earlier estimate of 7.3 per cent, after factoring in the latest data on agriculture and industrial production.
"We should be able to achieve the 8 per cent mark next year if we have a normal monsoon. We should see it adding 0.5-1 per cent to GDP growth... When you have a deficient rainfall for two years, obviously that is going to be a drag on the economy and that's why we couldn't achieve the 8 per cent growth target," he explained.

Sinha stressed on the need for sharing of intelligence
among various agencies and use of big data analytics for efficient investigation.
"The one area that I think we need to do in the directorate and across other government investigative agencies is in big data analytics, particularly in being able to access data across different government investigative agencies," he said in his address at the Enforcement Day event.
"For example, if you look at data that is maintained by RBI as part of the Fema and all of the foreign exchange that they track, that data are not correlated against the data that the Customs has in terms of transactions of bills of entry of goods leaving and coming into the country," he said.

If the different data are harnessed and shared among various agencies, the investigations would be more efficient, he added.
"We will also be able to pre-emptively identify a pattern through big data analytics on what kinds of mechanism and schemes are being utilised to use foreign exchange or illegal activity or take advantage of drawback duty incentives," Sinha said.
"... In BoB foreign exchange scandal, lots of transactions were not correlated between the bills of entry and the actual transmission of foreign exchange outside the country.