The Hindu: New Delhi: Saturday,
November 19, 2016.
The Supreme
Court on Friday said public disclosure of names of defaulters who owe banks
over Rs. 500 crore in bad loans is pointless.
A Bench led
by Chief Justice of India T.S. Thakur said focus, instead, should be on the
question “why these non-performing assets [NPAs] are piling up.”
“Disclosure
of the names will not lead us anywhere. The root of the problem is why are
these NPAs accumulating ... why are they being allowed to do so?” Chief Justice
Thakur observed.
The
observation from the Bench gains significance as it was on the Supreme Court’s
order that the government filed a confidential list of 57 defaulters who owe
the banks about Rs. 85,000 crore in bad loans.
The previous
hearings had seen the apex court turn the heat on the Reserve Bank of India for
expressing reluctance in making public the names of big loan defaulters.
“Who are
these people who have borrowed money and are not paying back? Why this fact
that the person has borrowed money and not paying back be not known to public?”
the Chief Justice had asked in the previous hearing.
The apex
court had said the RBI should bring the names of defaulters into the public
domain through the Right to Information (RTI) Act.
“People
should know how much money a person has borrowed and how much money he needs to
pay back. The amount payable should be known to public. Why should you withhold
information?” Chief Justice Thakur had asked.
On Friday,
the Bench’s change of stance about disclosure of the names was stark,
especially when it asked “what change will it [disclosing the names and details
of big defaulters to the public] do?”
“The real
service is to find out the root cause of the accumulated NPAs. Your petition is
not anyway about the disclosure of names,” Chief Justice Thakur addressed
advocate Kamini Jaiswal, representing the NGO, Centre for Public Interest
Litigation.
The court
said the second important thing was to recover the NPAs. To this,
Solicitor-General Ranjit Kumar, appearing for the Centre and the RBI, submitted
that the government was taking steps to clear the NPAs.
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