Correct diagnosis is a must to find solution, says Manmohan
A Mumbai court remanded in police custody till Oct. 22 Punjab and Maharashtra Cooperative (PMC) Bank’s former Director Surjit Singh Arora in connection with the multi-crore scam at the bank. Arora has been arrested by the Mumbai Police’s EOW. The court also remanded the bank’s former MD Joy Thomas in 14-day judicial custody, after his police remand ended on Thursday. Trai will finalise, in next two weeks, its views on call ring time — a contentious issue on which old and new operators have locked horns. On Jio’s latest allegations that rival telcos are fraudulently masking fixed-line as mobile calls for undue enrichment and should be slapped with penalty, a senior Trai official said the matter will be examined just as all complaints to the authority are. Mumbai, Oct. 17: Conceding that there were some “weaknesses” in his regime, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said here on Thursday that the Modi government should stop blaming UPA for every economic crisis, as five years was sufficient time to come up with solutions.
Addressing a press conference ahead of Maharashtra elections, he was replying to a question on Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s comments in the US, where she said the banking sector passed through its worst phase during the tenures of Singh and former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan.
The NDA government should have learnt from the UPA’s “mistakes”, and provided “credible solutions”, Singh said.
Had the NDA government learnt from the mistakes, fraud-accused jeweller Nirav Modi and other loan defaulters would not have fled with public money, or the banks’ situation would not have gone from “bad to worse”, Singh said.
“You cannot claim year after year that the fault lies with the UPA (United Progressive Alliance), you have been in office for five and half years and that is long enough period for a government committed to public welfare to do credible things. Merely passing the buck to UPA regime is no solution to India’s problems,” the former PM said.
Talking about his tenure as prime minister between 2004-14, Singh said, “What happened did happen. There were some weaknesses. But this government has been in office for five and half years, it should have learnt from our mistakes and provided credible solutions to those problems which are still affecting our economy,” he said.
Earlier, he said, “Before one can fix the economy, one needs a correct diagnosis of its ailments. The government is obsessed about somehow trying to fix blame on the opponents, in the process it is unable to find the solutions that will ensure revival of the economy.”
“You may score some brownie points, but you are not finding solutions to the problems of the suffering humanity of our country,” Singh added.
The move comes at a time when financial institutions, especially NBFCs like Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services and Dewan Housing Finance Corporation (DHFL) and co-operative banks like Punjab and Maharashtra Co-operative Bank, are showing signs of financial distress.
Nevertheless, the government took immediate measures by resolving all the ailing non-financial firms through Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), but it does not cover deposit-taking financial companies.
Under the current bank deposit insurance scheme, in case of an unlikely bank failure, deposits up to Rs 1 lakh are insured and paid back to the depositor by Deposit Insurance and Credit Guarantee Corporation (DICGC), a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of India.
While DICGC insures all types of deposits at commercial banks and cooperative banks, it does not cover deposits made with depost-taking NBFCs.
The source further said DICGC has proposed to hike deposit insurance to Rs 3 lakh from Rs 1 lakh, depending upon the demands of circumstances.
“It won’t happen overnight, rather it will take some time as the proposal is under the discussion stage at the Finance Ministry. The hike will only happen after taking a consensus from all stakeholders including