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| - Fact Check: No, the Centre is NOT privatising all public sector banks except SBI!
AFWA's investigation found that this claim is misleading. The Centre has not announced anything of this sort as of yet.
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India Today Fact Check
Two economists Poonam Gupta and Arvind Panagariya have recommended the privatisation of all nationalised banks, except SBI, in a policy paper. However, the government has not approved this recommendation yet.
Ever since Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman proposed to take up the privatisation of two public sector banks in her Budget speech for the fiscal year 2021-22, the issue has been widely debated. However, even as the pros and cons of such a move are being discussed, a few on social media have claimed that all nationalised banks, except the State Bank of India, will be privatised.
One such Facebook post contains a screenshot of a Zee News Hindi headline that claims the same.
AFWA’s investigation found that this claim is misleading. The Centre has not announced anything of this sort as of yet. Archived versions of such posts can be seen here.
AFWA PROBE
While investigating the claim, we found a report by The Times of India from July 12, according to which, a policy paper of the Indian Policy Forum recommended privatisation of all nationalised banks. It further stated that due to its better performance, SBI may remain under government control.
The policy paper was written by Poonam Gupta, the Director-General of the National Council of Applied Economic Research and a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, and Arvind Panagariya, former NITI Aayog Vice-Chairman and Columbia University professor. However, we found no media reports that claimed the Centre approved this recommendation.
We also looked for what Zee News reported, given that its headline was shared by many on social media.
We found the Zee News report from July 13 whose headline went viral. It says that the Centre will privatise two nationalised banks in 2022. It also mentioned the recommendations of Gupta and Panagariya.
However, according to an August 2 report in the Hindu Business Line, the government told the Rajya Sabha that the privatisation of public sector banks will have to wait and a Bill has not been listed for the current session. Minister of State for Finance Bhagwat K Karad said in a written reply: “As per list of business for monsoon session no such bill has been listed for introduction, consideration and passing.”
Hence, we can conclude that the viral post is misleading - as was the Zee news headline.
(With input from Sanjana Saxena)
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