Parliamentary panel to quiz RBI governor Urjit Patel today 

NEW DELHI: Reserve Bank of India governor Urjit Patel is likely to face tough questions from the parliamentary panel, on the amount of cash returned post demonetisation, mounting bad loans of banks and the series of recent frauds. After skipping meeting with the Parliament’s Standing Committee on Finance last month citing prior appointment, Urjit Patel is set to appear before the panel headed by Veerappa Moily on Tuesday.

The top agenda of the meeting will be mounting Non-performing Assets (NPAs), which has gone up by almost five times. On June 4, the panel met top brass of Public Sector Banks (PSBs) where SBI Chairperson Rajnish Kumar and PNB MD Sunil Mehta briefed the panel on various aspects of NPAs and banking frauds.
In the meeting, interestingly, the Punjab National Bank, which was the epicentre of Rs13,000 crore fraud, blamed loan waivers and demonetisation for rising NPAs.

“Due to loan waiver schemes, it has become a general tendency of the borrowers not to repay their debt obligations,” PNB said in a written submission. While the bankers blamed mainly large corporate for rising NPAs, the slippages in small accounts were attributed to “disruptions in the economy in the recent past, such as demonetisation, GST rollout and unfavourable weather conditions”.

Besides, demonetisation and ICICI fraud will also figure in the panel’s agenda. “It’s been a long time and the RBI has still to come out with an amount of the cash returned into system post demonetisation. And the Governor must share these details with the panel and I hope he will do it tomorrow,” said Trinamool Congress MP and member of the panel Dinesh Trivedi.