Governor is right: RBI should not have nominees on PSB boards

The RBI's remit should be in charge of bank supervision, and not operations

There was much to answer for when Reserve Bank of India Governor Urjit Patel met the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance earlier this week. The committee, which has among its members former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, raised a lot of queries on wide-ranging issues — from the impact of demonetisation to trust in the Indian banking system. The most important issue that came up was the regulation of public sector banks (PSBs) in the context of the Nirav Modi scandal, which cost Punjab National Bank Rs123 billion. The financial mess that PSBs find themselves in was another related point that