SICKENING
   Date :07-Nov-2019

 
EVEN as the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) carries on with raids and searches on various premises in connection with a massive fraud amounting to about Rs. 7,000 crore, the country gets one more sickening evidence of the kind of malaise that had affected India’s banking sector. The latest expose involves prestigious institutions such as the State Bank of India and several others, bringing to fore dangerous possibilities of the fraud getting expanded, covering more individuals and institutions. The operation spread to 192 places in 16 States and Union Territories, revealing in the process how widespread the cancerous growth has been. In all the agency has filed 42 cases of massive fraud whose cumulative cost has been assessed to be a minimum of Rs. 7,000 crore.
 
It may be a long time before the investigators are able to unearth the total fraud that has denuded India’s banking sector in the past few decades. The biggest problem was that the banks did not behave professionally when there was a sly invasion of their domain by the uncouth elements in business and politics. We have a lurking fear that even if all the details are exposed, some of the real culprits may still remain outside the law’s long and strong hand. For, the law may not be able to reach all those persons who were actually responsible for allowing a terrible contamination of Indian banking -- through political interference -- even as the banks were originally opposed to granting massive loans to parties with suspect characters. There were times when the banks would not grant a loan of even a lakh of rupees to an honest person just because he could not offer any collateral security.
 
That was treated as an anathema to the social objectives the nationalised banks were supposed to serve. So, in order to free the banks from the constraints of professional banking where collateral security was the norm, political leadership of the country created an eco-system in which norms were treated as obstacles needed to be by-passed. Brazen rupture of norms led to massive frauds because the parties involved hardly believed in the principle of repayment of loans. This was how Non Performing Assets (NPAs) worth thousands of crores came into existence and were considered normal, in the sense many people were involved in those, lending some sort of legitimacy, no matter how much cancerous. A few weeks ago, the Government introduced major reforms in public sector banking, effecting mega mergers, giving the bankers sweeping powers to make professionally correct decisions beyond any influence. However, all this happened now -- after much water has flown under the bridge.
 
From now on, things are more likely to improve tremendously. Yet, it is necessary to expose the wrongdoers in the larger interest. The current raids and searches by the CBI can be listed in that category. It is likely that many more skeletons would tumble out of cupboards once the sleuths press on. Some segments of the society may try to brand the exercise as vendetta. That notwithstanding, the operations must be continued with vigour so that all the uncouth elements that contaminated the banking sector are exposed fully and brought to book. It is worthy of appreciation that there is no political influence operating at this moment to impact the swoop negatively. This discipline should have been there right from the beginning so as to avoid any wrongdoing. But the kind of firmness with which the CBI and other agencies have been able to conduct their investigations is praiseworthy, to say the least. This no-nonsense mood must continue to take the investigation to their logical culmination. Indian banking sector deserves such cleansing.