Former Sebi chairman M Damodaran blamed the telephone calls from Delhi to Mumbai for the myriad problems that public sector banks face now and warned against their privatisation to resolve the crisis.

“Telephone calls from Delhi to Bombay, over the years, have been at the root of the problem of the public sector banks. People in Bombay have been unquestionably responding to the direction from Delhi,” Damod­aran said told the students of the RBI-run National Institute of Bank Management here on Wednesday on their convocation.

Defending public sector banks, he said privatisation couldn’t be the solution for all the bad loans issues they face and blamed their peculiar governance and ownership issues for the problems they face.

“I am not arguing that we should privatise everything because we’ve very recent evidences that privatisation is not a synonym for honesty or efficiency or to avoid conflict of interest,” he said.

It can be noted that large private sector banks ICICI Bank and Axis Bank are ste­eped in controversies due to weak corporate governance practices.

While ICICI Bank is embroiled in a controversy over the alleged conflict of interest involving its chief executive Chanda Kochhar and the business dealings of her husband Deepak Kochhar with the Videocon group, Axis Bank saw the tenure of its chief Shikha Sharma bei­ng cut to seven months from a three year-term after being nudged by RBI in the wake of high bad loans, which have grown more than fivefold during her tenure.

“The answer does not lie in privatisation. The answer lies in the fact that a country as heterogeneous as ours, needs a very strong public sector,” Damodaran said.

Blaming the ownership and management of state-r­un banks, he said “when you think ownership equals ma­n­agement, when you start looking over the shoulders of bank management to see the correctness of every transaction, when ownership translates to transactional supervision that you are not tasked with, then there is a problem of ownership.”