Ratnakar K. Naik
It is too early to say at this stage whether the BJP government would be selecting a brilliant economist as a successor to the outgoing governor, Raghuram Rajan. Whatever the reasons may be of his not being available for his 2nd term, certainly his ousting is ill-timed.
The country is embarked on various reforms related to finance and its policy measures. Particularly banking sector reforms are more important at this stage and a new governor, who would be appointed by the BJP of their choice, will take his own sweet time to adopt to new measures.
The names doing the round on the first day as a successor to Rajan do not sound appealing particularly that of Ms Arundhati Roy, who is supposed to be the SBI head. We need someone very strong like Mr Rajan at RBI to oversee the clean up of NPAs of various public sector banks including SBI itself. Bad debts were encouraged to grow by leaps and bounds when executives of Ms Arundhati Roy’s calibre were at the helm of affairs at SBI and many other public banks. They only managed to transfer these bad loans to NPA account without making fruitful efforts to have it recovered which was expected of them. These executives never acted tough with those business houses/businessmen resulting in ever growing NPAs. If such executives failed us then why should their names be doing the round for the Governor’s post?
The FM seems to vouch for his support to these public banks and willing to pump in more funds to these rogue banks who systematically helped the big business houses to swindle our money and gave free hand for loans and other facilities to create wealth for themselves by bringing in NPAs of lakhs of rupees. All these executives at various banks went scot-free including Mrs Arundhati Roy herself who could not control the NPAs of SBI over a period of time and some others alike.
Today if the common people go to the bank for seeking loans, they have to pay the highest rate of interest, with help of which, these banks do survive because billions of rupees are gone in NPAs. Otherwise we, the common people, would have been paying a very less interest rate against EMIs against loans taken for housing, vehicles, etc. Banks like SBI, BoB, disbursed loans to people like Vijay Mallya and never bothered to recover the loans in good time and chose to write off big amounts under some Account Head or transferred the amounts as NPAs bringing in big losses to the people of India. Nobody had been held accountable in the past and nobody would be held responsible in future too. This should not be accepted by the common people any further. Because at the end only we, the common people do suffer and the influentials like Mallya get away with wrong doings and we are compelled to pay higher rate of interest because public banks cannot afford to allow the lower interest on housing, vehicles, etc.
Influential personalities took advantage of these nationalised banks and government after government kept silent on bad debts created by these influential crook businessmen. This is the reality and we need a Governor who leads from the front to have the NPAs cleared and pave the way to book the culprits.
