BRINGING DOWN THE CURTAIN

The current chairman of the rather silent Banks Board Bureau ( BBB) and former CAG, Vinod Rai, is due to retire at the end of March. It now appears that the government is actively considering dissolving the bureau itself. The government apparently has been struggling to find a successor to Mr Rai and the prevailing view is that it has decided to shut down the bureau.

The bureau, an autonomous body under the aegis of the department of financial services, was set up in 2016 to help the government in selection of top executives of public sector banks and enforce a code of conduct and ethics for managerial personnel.

Sources say that Mr Rai was unable to make much headway in implementing the bureau’s charter. And in the light of the recent fraud at the Punjab National Bank, the inadequacies of the bureau show up even more starkly. Those in the know say that from its very inception, the BBB was completely marginalised in the appointment of all the top- level executives, including the head of Punjab National Bank. One BBB member, H. N. Sinor, even resigned after the board was bypassed when the government changed the top management of Bank of India and PNB. In the rejig, PNB chief Usha Ananthasubramanian was shifted to Allahabad Bank and Melwyn O. Rego, head of Bank of India, was sent to Syndicate Bank.

Is it the end of the road for BBB? We’ll learn in the days ahead.