Report of the webinar co-organized by All India Bank Officers Confederation and Centre for Financial Accountability on 26th December 2023.
On the 26th of December 2023, an online meeting was co-organized by the All India Bank Officers Confederation (AIBOC) and the Centre for Financial Accountability (CFA) to discuss the issues faced by Public Sector Banks (henceforth referred to as PSBs) and the road ahead.
The panel of experts included eminent scholars as well as representatives from the AIBOC (past and present). With an audience count of over 200 people, the occasion presented a perfect forum to discuss such a topic. What was common across everyone present in the forum was that they put the people first.
While introducing the discussion Anirban Bhattacharya from CFA said that while PSBs have been bearing the brunt of policy prescriptions such as privatisation, actions against unions, credit write-offs to big corporations under successive governments of different shades. However, what has been an alarming trend with the present government is that such pertinent issues are carefully drowned out in media noise with divisive agendas. During UPA times, the issue of NPAs moved the masses and was being actively discussed. Now, with NPAs ballooning to far greater proportions, massive write-offs are being gifted to wilful defaulters who are invariably large industrialists – just to manipulate the banks’ balance sheets at the cost of small savers and borrowers. But these issues find hardly any mention in our prime times. From overburdened public bank employees being called “inefficient”, to farmer suicides amounting to almost 30 suicides per day in the last nine years – people’s problems are consciously hidden from public scrutiny.
Read and Download the report here: How They Are Bleeding the Public Sector Banks: A Webinar Report