FEATURES EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW with SUBRATA ROY EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SUBRATA ROY AND SAHARA INDIA PARIWAR, BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK… Sahara: The Untold Story is based on painstaking research to demystify India’s most secretive and largely unlisted conglomerate, the Sahara India Pariwar. It also delves into the group’s ongoing legal battle with the market regulator. Entrepreneur Subrata Roy, the guardian angel of the group, whose feet are touched by everybody in the Pariwar, wants to reach out to a million lives and feels impeded and shuttered in by regulations. So the clash with the regulators was inevitable. But when a regulator slams one door, maverick Roy opens another. This play has been on since 1978, when Sahara was set up. Roy is well known for glamour and his association with film stars, cricketers and politicians. He exudes patriotism, with a statue of Bharat Mata (the presiding deity of the group) on a chariot driven by four fierce-looking lions adorning his headquarters in Lucknow. He is the Robin Hood of a country where only 35% of the adult population has access to formal banking services. This India and its millions of illiterate poor depositors stand in awe and admiration of him. But does he also exploit them? Do these poor people actually keep money with him or are they fronting for others? EXCERPT FROM THE SAHARA INDIA PARIWAR DISCLAIMER ‘The book at best can be treated as a perspective of the author with all its defamatory content, insinuation and other objections, which prompted us to exercise our right to approach the court of law in order to save the interest of the organization and its crores of depositors and 12 lakh workers.’ TamalBandyopadhyay, a deputy managing editor of Mint, is one of the most respected business journalists in India. Tamal has kept a close watch of the financial sector for over a decade and a half and has had a ringside view of the enormous changes in Indian finance and banking over this period. His first book, A Bank for the Buck, released by P Chidambaram in November 2012, has been a non-fiction bestseller.
Beyond Debit & Credit: The Untold Story of Indian Bankers Do you know what it meant when bankers said “Chinese cuisine”, “Punjabi food”, or “Gujarati thali”? An RBI governor let down his hair at his farewell dinner to swing to “Lungi Dance” from the Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Chennai Express. The chairman of a financial institution relied on “signals” from the idol of a goddess kept in his cabin for clearing loan proposals. A public sector bank chairman liked to munch hot chilies with his lunch. A kitchen help was deputed to mop up the sweat from his bald head! Roller Coaster is a string of such stories and revelations from the country’s foremost banking journalist's affair with the industry—even though banks were not ideal partners for such liaisons. He has seen the industry and dramatis personae grow over two and a half decades, first as a rookie reporter, then as an editor and a columnist, and, finally, as an author. The book brings to light the lives of India’s commercial and central bankers. But it does not discuss their successes, failures, or the ever-evolving dynamics of monetary and fiscal policies. It's about their persona, warts and all—how they are as leaders, how they evolved, and how they changed the culture and ethos of the Indian banking sector. Dive in for inside information about some of the biggest names associated with Indian banking—Uday Kotak, Sandeep Bakhshi, Amitabh Chaudhry, V. Vaidyanathan, as well as C. Rangarajan, Bimal Jalan, Y. V. Reddy, D. Subbarao, Raghuram Rajan, Urjit Patel, Shaktikanta Das, and many more.
This is the story of Bandhan, the only bank that emerged in eastern India after Independence. Founded by the son of a sweet vendor, with a mere Rs 2 lakh, the sum total of his life savings. On 17 June, 2015, Chandra Shekhar Ghosh stepped out of the Reserve Bank of India building in Mumbai with the much-coveted banking licence, beating some of the country's top corporate houses. This moment compensated for all the frustrations that had come along the way. A year later, Bandhan Bank was launched with 6.7 million small borrowers. So, how did Ghosh build India's biggest MFI from scratch and then, along with his team, transform it into a universal bank? Bandhan: The Making of a Bank chronicles that journey. This is also Ghosh's personal story-of a boy growing up in small-town Agartala struggling with poverty, but relentless in his ambition to make it big. He battles competition, hostile moneylenders, a tough economic climate and the perpetual lack of resources. Nobody in India perhaps knows better than him the psyche of a small borrower and the alchemy of doing business with the poor, profitably. This is one of India's biggest entrepreneurial stories.
How did the Indian banking industry protect itself from the Lehman crash? What nearly wiped out the MFI sector in India? Why are public-sector banks suffering from a large pile of NPAs? What is the conflict between the RBI and the finance ministry? From Lehman to Demonetization is the epic story of banking in India in the last decade. The years from 2007 to 2017 were the most tumultuous and exciting time for this sector, which saw D. Subbarao, Raghuram Rajan and Urijit Patel as RBI governors working with finance ministers Pranab Mukherjee, P. Chidambaram and Arun Jaitley. What a decade it has been-from India's first MFI, SKS Microfinance, entering the capital market to the near death of the industry; the RBI giving the nod to twenty-three banks and becoming an inflation targeter; from 9 per cent economic growth for three consecutive years to the jolt of demonetization. Featuring essays and interviews with the who's who of this sector, including Deepak Parkeh, K.V. Kamath, Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chanda Kochchar, Aditya Puri, Shikha Sharma, Raghuram Rajan, U.K. Sinha and Viral Acharya, this book makes for a riveting read. If you had to read one book on banking in India, let this be it!
For the past 25 years, Tamal Bandyopadhyay has been a keen student of Indian banking. A lifelong reporter and journalist, he is an award-winning national business columnist and a bestselling author. He is widely recognised for ‘Banker’s Trust’, a weekly column whose unerring ability to anticipate and dissect major policy decisions in India’s banking and finance has earned him a large print and digital audience around the world. The column won Tamal the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism (commentary and interpretative writing) for 2017. Banker’s Trust now appears in Business Standard, where he is a Consulting Editor. Previously, Tamal has had stints with three other national business dailies in India, and was a founding member of Mint newspaper and Livemint.com. He is also a Senior Adviser to Jana Small Finance Bank Ltd. Between 2014 and 2018, as an adviser on strategy for Bandhan Bank Ltd, he had a ringside view of the first-ever transformation of a microfinance institution in India into a universal bank. Author of five other books, Tamal is widely recognised as a contributor to the Oxford Handbook of the Indian Economy and Making of New India: Transformation Under Modi Government. In 2019, LinkedIn named him as one of the ‘most influential voices in India’.
Beyond Debit & Credit: The Untold Story of Indian Bankers Do you know what it meant when bankers said “Chinese cuisine”, “Punjabi food”, or “Gujarati thali”? An RBI governor let down his hair at his farewell dinner to swing to “Lungi Dance” from the Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Chennai Express. The chairman of a financial institution relied on “signals” from the idol of a goddess kept in his cabin for clearing loan proposals. A public sector bank chairman liked to munch hot chilies with his lunch. A kitchen help was deputed to mop up the sweat from his bald head! Roller Coaster is a string of such stories and revelations from the country’s foremost banking journalist's affair with the industry—even though banks were not ideal partners for such liaisons. He has seen the industry and dramatis personae grow over two and a half decades, first as a rookie reporter, then as an editor and a columnist, and, finally, as an author. The book brings to light the lives of India’s commercial and central bankers. But it does not discuss their successes, failures, or the ever-evolving dynamics of monetary and fiscal policies. It's about their persona, warts and all—how they are as leaders, how they evolved, and how they changed the culture and ethos of the Indian banking sector. Dive in for inside information about some of the biggest names associated with Indian banking—Uday Kotak, Sandeep Bakhshi, Amitabh Chaudhry, V. Vaidyanathan, as well as C. Rangarajan, Bimal Jalan, Y. V. Reddy, D. Subbarao, Raghuram Rajan, Urjit Patel, Shaktikanta Das, and many more.
FEATURES EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW with SUBRATA ROY EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SUBRATA ROY AND SAHARA INDIA PARIWAR, BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK… Sahara: The Untold Story is based on painstaking research to demystify India’s most secretive and largely unlisted conglomerate, the Sahara India Pariwar. It also delves into the group’s ongoing legal battle with the market regulator. Entrepreneur Subrata Roy, the guardian angel of the group, whose feet are touched by everybody in the Pariwar, wants to reach out to a million lives and feels impeded and shuttered in by regulations. So the clash with the regulators was inevitable. But when a regulator slams one door, maverick Roy opens another. This play has been on since 1978, when Sahara was set up. Roy is well known for glamour and his association with film stars, cricketers and politicians. He exudes patriotism, with a statue of Bharat Mata (the presiding deity of the group) on a chariot driven by four fierce-looking lions adorning his headquarters in Lucknow. He is the Robin Hood of a country where only 35% of the adult population has access to formal banking services. This India and its millions of illiterate poor depositors stand in awe and admiration of him. But does he also exploit them? Do these poor people actually keep money with him or are they fronting for others? EXCERPT FROM THE SAHARA INDIA PARIWAR DISCLAIMER ‘The book at best can be treated as a perspective of the author with all its defamatory content, insinuation and other objections, which prompted us to exercise our right to approach the court of law in order to save the interest of the organization and its crores of depositors and 12 lakh workers.’ TamalBandyopadhyay, a deputy managing editor of Mint, is one of the most respected business journalists in India. Tamal has kept a close watch of the financial sector for over a decade and a half and has had a ringside view of the enormous changes in Indian finance and banking over this period. His first book, A Bank for the Buck, released by P Chidambaram in November 2012, has been a non-fiction bestseller.
This is the story of Bandhan, the only bank that emerged in eastern India after Independence. Founded by the son of a sweet vendor, with a mere Rs 2 lakh, the sum total of his life savings. On 17 June, 2015, Chandra Shekhar Ghosh stepped out of the Reserve Bank of India building in Mumbai with the much-coveted banking licence, beating some of the country's top corporate houses. This moment compensated for all the frustrations that had come along the way. A year later, Bandhan Bank was launched with 6.7 million small borrowers. So, how did Ghosh build India's biggest MFI from scratch and then, along with his team, transform it into a universal bank? Bandhan: The Making of a Bank chronicles that journey. This is also Ghosh's personal story-of a boy growing up in small-town Agartala struggling with poverty, but relentless in his ambition to make it big. He battles competition, hostile moneylenders, a tough economic climate and the perpetual lack of resources. Nobody in India perhaps knows better than him the psyche of a small borrower and the alchemy of doing business with the poor, profitably. This is one of India's biggest entrepreneurial stories.
For the past 25 years, Tamal Bandyopadhyay has been a keen student of Indian banking. A lifelong reporter and journalist, he is an award-winning national business columnist and a bestselling author. He is widely recognised for ‘Banker’s Trust’, a weekly column whose unerring ability to anticipate and dissect major policy decisions in India’s banking and finance has earned him a large print and digital audience around the world. The column won Tamal the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism (commentary and interpretative writing) for 2017. Banker’s Trust now appears in Business Standard, where he is a Consulting Editor. Previously, Tamal has had stints with three other national business dailies in India, and was a founding member of Mint newspaper and Livemint.com. He is also a Senior Adviser to Jana Small Finance Bank Ltd. Between 2014 and 2018, as an adviser on strategy for Bandhan Bank Ltd, he had a ringside view of the first-ever transformation of a microfinance institution in India into a universal bank. Author of five other books, Tamal is widely recognised as a contributor to the Oxford Handbook of the Indian Economy and Making of New India: Transformation Under Modi Government. In 2019, LinkedIn named him as one of the ‘most influential voices in India’.
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