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The 2021 budget was a budget for the banking sector with several ground-breaking announcements. For the first time the government has agreed to privatise public sector banks; it also announced the setting up of a development financial institution to fund infrastructure and an asset reconstruction company for legacy bad assets of banks. Now, the budget is through. Indianomics spoke to Debashish Panda, Secretary, Department of Financial Services, the man at the Centre of all these developments and who must have drafted many of these plans.

“This has been for the first time where we have been able to get four of our legislations either amended or new one enacted from the opening of the budget session till the close. So less than two months – February the budget announcement was made and it is not even end of March. Before end of March, we have been able to do four of these amendments,” he said.

“These were huge pieces of legislations, which involved a lot of consultations with multiple stakeholders. That takes a lot of time. So, our focus was to get them cleared in this session so that it gets going,” he added.

On bank privatisation, he mentioned, “We have parallelly started the work and the bank privatisation also involves multiple stakeholders and a series of action is involved and also legislative changes. So, we have already started our consultations with the regulator, that is the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and we are assessing the various alternatives that are possible through which we can make the changes in the law.”

For entire conversation, watch accompanying video…

(Edited by : Bivekananda Biswas)