TMB imbroglio

TMB’s explanation for the wrong credit if ₹9,000 crore appears genuine. The account number in most of banks is 11 digits. Instead of typing the amount of the cheque/claim, if the account number is typed by mistake, the amount of credit/claim becomes thousands of crores.

Seven years back, when I was in charge of treasury, another PSB typed the account number of our customer instead of the cheque amount. We were sadly thrown to a situation of our bank not having adequate balance in our RBI account. To avoid penalty on us, we explained to RBI the typographical error of the other bank. It took a few days to sort out the issue and the other bank was severely warned by RBI.

Hence the risks involved here are two. One, the bank on which wrong claim is made, may have inadequate balance in its RBI account and two, the risk of wrongly credited amount getting withdrawn from the account. While the first risk is real, the second issue may not kick in, as the credit in the account will be under ‘shadow balance’ and the ‘shadow’ will disappear only after the clearing time for return of instruments is over. (SMS will be generated, but the customer cannot withdraw the balance shown under ‘shadow balance.)

To avoid such manual mistakes, system triggers needs to be developed. For example, if the net claims by the bank/on the bank in NACH exceeds the monthly/ quarterly average, the event should be treated as a trigger, warranting the attention of bank treasury immediately.

V Viswanathan

Coimbatore

Data confusion

Apropos, ‘Why PM must take over the Statistics Ministry’, (September 25), the statistical system of a country acts as its mirror. The data generated tells us how a country is performing on key socioeconomic parameters such as per capita income, inflation, poverty, life expectancy, and average years of schooling. But India’s statistical system faces a major crisis. Producers and users of official statistics have often stated that the lack of a clear road map to address this crisis.

Without wholehearted reforms, India’s statistical system will fail to deliver the kind of high-quality, high-frequency datasets that Indian citizens, policymakers, and investors expect from it today.

N Sadhasiva Reddy

Bengaluru

Countering Canada

Apropos ‘Settle the Canada row tactfully’ ( September 25), the ‘duplicity’ of the Western media comparing India with countries that have “carried out assassinations on foreign soil”, but ignoring the US’s targeted killings of ‘terrorists’, is hardly surprising.

Though the article suggests exploring talks with Canada with the help of a third country like US but it may be quite significant to take into account the NYT story that says that it was US intelligence that gave context that helped Canada link India to Nijjar case. If true this does put a question mark over the US reliability as an ally. India may have to craft an astute strategy to counter Canada’s harbouring of Khalistani militants on its soil.

SK Gupta

New Delhi

Corrigendum

The sentence in the article, ‘Why PM must take over Statistics Ministry’ should read as follows:

“Not this, not that”, or “neither this, nor that”. The concept is found in the Upanishads and the Avadhuta Gita and constitutes an analytical meditation helping a person to understand the nature of the Brahman by negating everything that is not Brahman.”

The error is regretted.

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