Public Policy Forum & LITFest 2021
Pandemonium: The Great Indian Banking Tragedy – Tamal Bandyopadhyay
More about the Book, Author & LITFest…
“The Reserve Bank of India would like to assure the general public that Indian banking system is safe and stable.” – RBI statement, 1 October 2019
Why did India’s central bank have to issue an unprecedented statement to that effect?
In Pandemonium: The Great Indian Banking Tragedy, Tamal Bandyopadhyay takes you in search for the answer. It is a compelling story on the rot in India’s banking system – how promoters easily swapped equity with debt as bank managements looked the other way to protect their balance sheets, until the RBI began waging a war against ballooning bad loans.
What really ails public sector banks, the backbone of India’s financial system? Is it the government ownership itself, or how this owner actually behaves? And just when many were rooting for privatisation as a way out, powerful bankers such as Chanda Kochhar and Rana Kapoor exposed the soft underbelly of seemingly more efficient and profitable private banks of India.
A timely and insider look at the dramatic forces reshaping banking in Asia’s third-largest economy, this book is a bird’s-eye view of Indian banking and also a fly-on-the-wall documentary. A must-read to understand contemporary India’s challenges and economic potential.
Tamal Bandyopadhyay has been a keen student of Indian banking for the past 25 years. A lifelong reporter and journalist, he is an award-winning national business columnist and a bestselling author. He is widely recognised for ‘Banker’s Trust’ a weekly column whose unerring ability to anticipate and dissect major policy decisions in India’s banking and finance has earned him a large print and digital audience around the world. The column won him the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism (commentary and interpretative writing) for 2017.
Banker’s Trust now appears in Business Standard, where he is a Consulting Editor. Previously, he has had stints with three other national business dailies in India, and was a founding member of Mint newspaper and Livemint.com.
Author of five other books, Tamal has been named by Linkedin as one of the “most influential voices in India’.
Shinjini Kumar
Co-Founder, Salt
Tamal Bandyopadhyay
Consulting Editor, Business Standard & Senior Adviser, Jana Small Finance Bank
Sudarshan Sen
Former Executive Director, RBI
S S Mundra
Former Deputy Governor, RBI
Arijit Basu
Chairman, HDB Financial Services Ltd & Distinguished Fellow, SKOCH Development Foundation