Dilip Cherian |The Invisible Hand Of The Bureaucrat In India’s Pvt Banks

For a country that prides itself on producing world-class financial talent, India displays surprisingly little faith in its own bankers. We've produced institution builders like Deepak Parekh; Indian professionals have gone on to lead some of the world’s biggest global banks, and an Indian now heads the World Bank. Yet when it comes to choosing the people who will preside over our largest private banks, the search often ends not in the banking industry but in the ranks of retired IAS officers.

HDFC Bank’s appointment of former Chief Election Commissioner of India Rajiv Kumar as its part-time chairman is merely the latest example. ICICI, Axis, Kotak Mahindra, Bandhan and Federal Bank have all made similar appointments. Individually, these appointments may be perfectly justified. Together, they reveal a mindset. It isn’t about the competence of retired senior babus but about why they have increasingly become the default choice.

The banks are, in many ways, mirroring Mr Modi's own governance philosophy. Over the past decade, retired and serving officials have increasingly occupied key positions across regulators, commissions and public institutions. Domain expertise often takes a back seat to administrative pedigree. The IAS has become India’s all-purpose leadership cadre. Private banks appear to have internalised the same logic.

But if India’s premier private banks don’t trust career bankers to occupy their own boardrooms, who exactly does? Three decades after liberalisation, we still instinctively look towards North Block whenever an important chair falls vacant. Ownership may have changed, but the mindset hasn’t.

Why Modi is keeping Vikram Misri

The Modi government has made its choice. By extending foreign secretary Vikram Misri’s tenure by another year, it has made one thing clear: this isn't the time to change India’s top diplomat.

The decision is less about one individual than about the moment India finds itself in. The coming year will test Indian diplomacy like few others, with the BRICS chairmanship, a fragile relationship with China, wars in Europe and West Asia, and the challenge of balancing ties with both Washington and Moscow while championing the Global South.

This is hardly the time for a handover, the government believes.

Mr Misri, a 1989-batch IFS officer, is one of the government's most trusted diplomats. He has served in Beijing, worked as deputy national security adviser and advised three Prime Ministers. Few officers understand the China brief as well as he does, and this qualification carries considerable weight in the MEA today.

The extension also fits a broader pattern. The Modi Sarkar has never been rigid about retirement dates when it believes continuity serves the national interest. Experience and institutional memory have repeatedly trumped convention.

There is, of course, a downside. Every extension delays promotions and leaves younger officers waiting longer for the top job. That is a legitimate concern. But in today’s volatile geopolitical climate, for the government to keep a steady hand at the wheel was an easy call.

Haryana’s real crisis

Haryana’s real crisis isn’t corruption. It’s the collapse of accountability.

If this doesn’t shake confidence in Haryana's administration, it's hard to imagine what will. Three IAS officers were arrested in 12 days, and nearly ₹600 crore of public money was allegedly siphoned off. More babus are reportedly under the scanner.

These officials occupied some of the highest offices in the state administration. The arrested babus R.K. Singh, Pankaj Agarwal and Pradeep Kumar handled education, agriculture, urban governance and environmental regulation.

The obvious question is one the government cannot duck: how does almost ₹600 crore disappear without anyone noticing? Government money doesn't simply walk out of the treasury. It passes through approvals, audits, finance departments, treasury officials and senior supervisors. If the investigators are right, this wasn’t just the failure of a few individuals. It was the failure of the system that was supposed to stop them.

That is what makes this scandal so disturbing, even in this current season of scandals erupting all around.

Governments love talking about transparency, digital governance and ease of doing business, but if the state’s own financial safeguards can allegedly be bypassed with such ease, citizens are bound to worry about policy uncertainty. If the government can’t protect its own money, how can it protect yours?

Suspending officers after they’re arrested is the easy part. The difficult part is fixing an administration where accountability often begins only after the CBI arrives. The real scandal isn’t that corruption allegedly happened. Sadly, India has seen that before. The real scandal is that it appears to have flourished inside a system built to prevent exactly this sort of abuse. That’s the lesson Haryana cannot afford to ignore.