Public sector banks are funded by taxpayer money and they are answerable to the public. However, Moneylife through a series of RTI has found that a lot of public sector banks have written-off huge amounts which is rightfully the public money. Plus they constantly stall RTI requests from citizens as well. In effort to shed more light to this issues, Moneylife Foundation requested Mr Vivek Velankar of the Sajag Nagrik Manch and Mr Girish Mittal to speak on the same.
Mr Girish Mittal began by sharing a brief overview of how the financial sector and public companies have been evading answering questions under RTI by using frivolous exemptions. He also shared his story with the RBI petition where he was one of the petitioners and how despite the Supreme Court passing a favourable judgement, there has been very little and slow movement. Mr Vivek Velankar began the session by sharing how he had filed multiple RTIs on different PSUs asking for their P&L statements and other details but banks tried evading those. Once he got access to them, he shared how huge the amount written of is and also emphasised on why public needs to demand more accountability from their officials.
The session was moderated by Mr Yogesh Sapkal, Deputy Editor of Moneylife and was attended by over 120 people.
Video recording of the session: