Ill‐informed min

It was appalling to note the damaging and misleading remarks the junior minister for finance, Anurag Thakur, is reported to have made about the banking industry. It exposes his poor knowledge of economics and finance when he observed that privatising a sick bank would not attract investors; that India needs more robust banks, more lenders, increased credit and liquidity; that the NDA government inherited a banking system laden with NPAs from the UPA regime. He conveniently appears to have forgotten the Atal Bihari Vajpayee regime of five years. He claims the NDA government carried out an extensive asset quality review and set up a prompt corrective action framework. Actually, these steps were taken in the tenures of former RBI Governors Raghuram Rajan and Urjit Patel.