In FY15, banks with high NPAs rejected more RTI requests

As the Finance Ministry and the central bank try to clean up the balance sheets of troubled public sector lenders, a new study has found that banks that saw a sharp rise in bad loans in 2014-15 were not very forthcoming with information requests by the public.

While noting that there was “no positive or negative correlation between the volume of net NPAs and the number of RTI applications they dealt with”, a compilation done by Venkatesh Nayak of Commonwealth Human Rights Initiatives found that the proportion of rejection of Right to Information applications was quite high in public sector banks that had high volume of non-performing assets (NPAs) in 2014-15.

For instance, Indian Overseas Bank, Bank of Baroda and Canara Bank, which reported bad loans of over ₹ 8,000 crore each, rejected 33-50 per cent of all RTI applications in 2014-15.

Similarly, State Bank of India, which reported the highest net NPA of ₹27,590 crore in the period, rejected 20 per cent of all RTI applications.

State Bank of Mysore and Vijaya Bank were the only exceptions to this trend and they rejected over a third of all requests despite bad loans of less than ₹2,000 crore.

The highest rejection rates for RTIs was by State Bank of Hyderabad that turned down 64.5 per cent of all requests in 2012-13, followed by Andhra Bank 55.1 per cent (in 2014-15), and Canara Bank 49.1 per cent (in 2014-15).

As the name suggests, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiatives (CHRI) was set up by several Commonwealth associations and works out of New Delhi, London and Accra (Ghana).

For the study, CHRI analysed the RTI application statistics of 24 public sector banks that were published in the annual reports of the Central Information Commission over 2012-15.

This is also the period when bad loans of public sector lenders saw a sharp jump. According to RBI data, the gross non-performing advances (GNPAs) ratio rose to 6 per cent or ₹2.67 lakh crore by March-end 2015 from 5.7 per cent at end-March 2014. Net NPA ratio also increased to 2.7 per cent from 2.2 per cent during the same period.

Reasons unclear But the CHRI study said the reasons for the rejections of the RTI applications were unclear and needed to be examined further. “Unless a study of the nature and scope of the RTI applications dealt with by these banks is undertaken, it is not possible to state authoritatively as to whether the high proportion of rejection was due to information being sought about NPAs from these banks,” it said.

Finance Ministry officials, however, said public sector banks are under the RTI Act and have to disclose information based on its provisions. “It could be that in particular cases the request for information did not comply with the RTI Act,” said an official.

(Inputs from Aditi Nigam)

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