SC chides RBI, says big defaulters escape while farmers driven to suicide
The Supreme Court reprimanded the Reserve Bank of India after RBI said that it should not disclose details of the loan defaulters. SC said the rich were defaulting on crores while the poor farmers had to commit suicides when they default on loans. SC opined that if the banks could not reveal the names they should atleast expose the defaulted "huge and substantial amounts".
Answering an RTI application registered by the Indian Express, the RBI had revealed that while bad debts "stood at Rs.15,551 crore for the financial year ending March 2012, they had shot up by over three times to Rs.52,542 crore by the end of March 2015."
Taking due note of Indian Express discovery, SC directed the RBI to present the list of companies that had defaulted on the payment of bank loans of Rs.500 crore or more. However, the regulator pleaded against making this information public, which was illegal. The SC said so while hearing a PIL by CPIL on the "non-performing assets of Housing and Urban Development Corporation (HUDCO)."
CPIL's PIL had raised the issue of loans advanced to some companies by Housing and Urban Development Corporation (HUDCO). The plea cited that top 10 Indian banks had written off more than Rs.80,000 crores worth of corporate debt. It also contended that the RBI had allowed restructuring of Rs.3 trillion debt of various companies which showed that the tax payers money was being wasted.
In cases of loans that are unreasonably difficult to collect (which reflect badly on a bank's financial statements), the banks practice write-offs to "remove loans from their balance sheets and reduce their overall tax liability."
The RBI gave the SC a list of defaulters who'd failed to pay back loans of over Rs.500 crore, however, RBI requested the apex court to refrain from making the names public. RBI contended that disclosing the names might "accentuate the failure of business rather than nursing it back to health." RBI stated that the disclosure could affect the employees working for these entities.
Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Raghuram Rajan said: "...if simply any act of default, without understanding the severity or reasons, is put up for public consumption, it may result in a loss of business as well as undue anxiety and panic and therefore chill business activity".
