Fact Check: Will all nationalised banks except SBI be privatised by government

New Delhi, Aug 16: In her budget speech, Union Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman proposed to take take up the privatisation of two public sector banks. Since then the issue has been widely debated and now a few on the 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 with the claim that all nationalised banks except the State Bank of India will be privatised.

OneIndia has learnt that the claim is misleading. The government of India has made no such announcement to this effect.

We stumbled upon a report which spoke about a police paper of the Indian Policy Forum that recommended the privatisation of all national banks except the State Bank of India due to its better performance.

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. While there is a paper to this effect, we found nothing that said that the government had approved the same.

We also found a July 13 report of Zee News which said that the Centre will privatise two national banks in 2022. It also spoke about the recommendations of Gupta and Panagariya.

On August 2 the government had told the Rajya Sabha that the privatisation of the public sector banks will have to wait and a Bill has not been listed for the current session.

"As per list of business for monsoon session no such bill has been listed for introduction, consideration and passing," Minister of State for Finance Bhagwat K Karad said in a written reply.

We can thus conclude that the claim is as misleading as the news headline posted by Zee.