Indian banking today is at a tipping point. Banks are burdened with non-performing assets, incurring significant losses due to provisioning and unable to sustain credit growth, and therefore changes are both necessary and inevitable. There are possible strategies with very different implications: many leading banks could be restructured with state support and encouraged to regain the status they had as major instruments of development policy in the two decades after nationalization; or they could be allowed to weaken further, only to be swallowed up by large domestic and private players at bargain prices. The second option would take the sector back to the pre-1969 years when banks were instruments of private aggrandizement rather than of social advance, so it is not even the beginning of an alternative. This report suggests that the first option is the necessary and desirable strategy, and further that it needs to be accompanied by other measures that would correct the damage wrought by misguided policies over the last two and a half decades, as well as place Indian banks on a footing that enable them to play a leading role in a larger transformation of both economic policy and the nation’s development path.
Please click here to access the full report, which was prepared for All India Bank Officers’ Confederation – AIBOC.