Elgar Parishad case: HC allows Varavara Rao’s family to visit him
MUMBAI: The Bombay high court on Tuesday permitted family members of poet Varavara Rao to meet him at Mumbai’s Nanavati Hospital, where the 81-year-old is undergoing treatment for Covid-19.
A bench of justices RD Dhanuka and VG Bisht granted permission, adding that the meeting would be subject to hospital protocol on granting access to relatives of Covid-19 patients.
Rao, an accused in the Elgar Parishad-koregaon Bhima case, tested positive for coronavirus on July 16 and has been undergoing treatment at the Nanavati Hospital.
The HC granted permission after additional solicitor general Anil Singh, the counsel for National Investigation Agency (NIA), told the court that the agency had no objection to Rao’s family being permitted to meet him, or to his family being informed of his health condition, subject to hospital protocols.
Rao had filed a plea earlier this month through his lawyer Sudeep Pasbola, seeking bail.
Advocate Pasbola also urged the court to let the poet meet his family, saying the latter was “almost on his death bed”.
Earlier in the day, the court had directed Nanavati Hospital to submit a report in court on Rao’s health condition and the nature of medical treatment being provided to himwithin three days.
The court had said once it went through the hospital’s report, it will decide on the plea filed by Rao’s family seeking a copy.
The court will also hear arguments on Rao’s bail plea after the hospital report.
The high court is likely to hold the next hearing in the case on August 7.
My interpretation of his remarks is that we might have to encounter scenarios of stress which far exceed the usual standards of Basel capital requirements. Implicitly what he was suggesting was that the hit of a prolonged lock down on bank loans of individual and MSMES might far exceed traditional losses. The latest Financial Stability Report endorses his remarks. The Non Performing Assets (NPAS) to advances ratio is far in excess of what we have ever seen. With the GDP set to contract anywhere between 5% and 10%, some analysts believe that the NPA ratio could end up even higher. I think there is still time. I am hoping that the RBI will use some of these estimates to get both public sector and private sector banks to shore up their capital.
It is very difficult exactly for the reason you mentioned. When you succeed with it, nothing happens. It is just that the counter factual would have been very bad. However in some times the job is a bit easier. Look at our last decade. While there are many hits and misses, most would agree that our NPA problem on the banking and even non-banking sector are the two most important problems we have to deal with. These are the times when politics and economics have to align themselves, because you have a striking example of what has gone wrong. What I’ve tried to argue in my book is that somehow in spite of that collective movement having gained ground, within a short period of time we seem to have reversed the gains.
First and foremost they are desirable precisely because our bank underwriting standards are not up to scratch. Except a few well capitalised private banks and handful of public sector banks, the track record has not been very impressive. If banks are not keeping well, at many points of time they are actually very risk averse to lend. In such a time it is a boon to have a well-functioning bond market. It allows savings in the economy to get channelled through non-bank routes. Developing the corporate bond market is another step in the direction of developing more diversified sources of funding in India. I fully agree with Dr Reddy that until government borrowing does not become more manageable in size, it is going to be a herculean chal
I wasn’t at the RBI when that phase happened. Even in the post-demonetisation phase, post the normalisation of liquidity, the government was very much on board in some of the critical moves in getting the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code to be applied on stressed assets. In my view demonetisation was not the critical event, although it did trigger a complex process of liquidity flowing into shadow banks and Non Banking Financial Companies. The glut of liquidity led to them underwriting very poor quality loans.
I think the developed economy stimulus has been very-very large. But the key focus has to be on the health curve. The US is still not doing that great. Things are not looking great in Brazil and India. If big parts of the world are still facing the pandemic, an economic recovery is going to be hard.