PSBs had worst phase under Manmohan, Rajan: Sitharaman

| | New York
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PSBs had worst phase under Manmohan, Rajan: Sitharaman

Thursday, 17 October 2019 | PTI | New York

PSBs had worst phase under Manmohan, Rajan: Sitharaman

India’s public sector banks had the “worst phase” under the “combination” of former prime minister Manmohan Singh and ex-RBI governor Raghuram Rajan, and giving the ailing banks a “lifeline” was her primary duty now, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has said.

The public sector banks have been grappling with bad loans and the government has been taking measures to address the issue. In August, the government announced upfront capital infusion to the tune of Rs 70,000 crore into the public sector banks. Besides, 10 public sector banks are being consolidated into four.

Delivering a lecture at the prestigious Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs here on Tuesday, Sitharaman said:

“While economists can take a view of what prevails today or prevailed years ago, but I will also want answers for the time when Rajan was in the Governor’s post speaking about the Indian banks, for which today to give a lifeline is the primary duty of the Finance Minister of India. And the lifeline-kind of an emergency has not come overnight”.

“I do respect Raghuram Rajan as a great scholar who chose to be in the central bank in India at a time when the Indian economy was all buoyant,” she said during the lecture organised by the Deepak and Neera Raj Centre on Indian Economic Policies of the Columbia University.

Asked about the ex-RBI governor’s comments during a recent lecture at Brown University in which he had apparently mentioned that in its first term, the Narendra Modi government had not done better on the economy because the government was extremely centralised and the leadership does not appear to have a consistent articulated vision on how to achieve economic growth.

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