Letter to BS: Reserve Bank of India needs to upgrade oversight capacity

It is high time the RBI tightened its audit and information gathering processes to ensure that its officers do a thorough job of supervising banks

This refers to your editorial “Failures of supervision” (September 30) regarding the deficient role of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in the crisis plaguing the Punjab and Maharashtra Co-Operative Bank (PMC). The co-operative movement in India was started with an act of Parliament in 1914, primarily for dealing with the problem of rural credit and to encourage “thrift, self-help and cooperation among agriculturists, artisans and persons of limited means”. Being so, how PMC could have had an exposure of Rs 6,500 crore (which is 73 per cent of the bank’s total assets) vis-a-vis the bankrupt Housing Development & Infrastru-cture