PEOPLEBUSINESS

Urjit Patel, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, criticised some state governments who decided to write off farm loans. According to Patel, such waivers undermine an honest credit culture and engender moral hazard. "It leads to crowding out of private borrowers as high government borrowing tends to impose an increasing cost of borrowing for others,” Patel said during the RBI's bi-monthly monetary policy announcement. He has, however, urged lenders to bring down lending rates as policy rates have come down by 175 basis points while weighted average lending rates have come down only by 8590 basis points. The RBI Governor was recently in the news when his monthly basic pay was raised from `90,000 to `2.5 lakh by the government.