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The Decline of Foreign Banks in India: A Closer Look  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyN_WbUM-Fw

Moneylife News Bite

Why Foreign Firms Have Bit the Dust in the Financial Sector https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKko5oWZOBY   May 8, 2024
Foreign banks once thrived in India's financial sector, but now they're retreating. Citibank, a retail finance pioneer, recently sold its Indian business to Axis Bank, echoing a broader trend. Standard Chartered and HSBC have minimal presence compared to local giants like HDFC Bank. Similarly, foreign mutual funds struggle, with many, including Morgan Stanley and Fidelity, leaving. This shift marks a departure from optimistic projections of the 1990s. Mismanagement and global crises favoured Indian firms, which capitalised on trends like digital banking. Foreign companies' short-term perspectives led to their exit, while Indian firms thrived. Watch the video as Debashis Basu explains.

https://www.moneylife.in/article/why-foreign-firms-have-bit-the-dust-in-the-financial-sector/74103.html  While Indian entrepreneurs and managers have, indeed, shown tremendous talent and execution skills, the ‘Quit India’ policy for foreign financial companies has not happened by design, but by default. 

Quite frankly, all the assumptions made in the mid-1990s about the Indian middle class have turned out to be wrong. There was no smooth surge in middle-class prosperity for foreign businesses to tap into because the Indian economy continued to be mismanaged. Productivity remained poor, corruption and taxes stayed high, and crony capitalism undermined infrastructure growth in the mid-2000s, resulting in bad loans of Rs20 lakh crore in PSBs.

when disruptive opportunities like the digital on-boarding of customers happened, domestic banks were better placed to scale up. Similarly, when the stock market took off post-Covid-19, domestic mutual funds and broking firms grew rapidly.

While the financial sector threw up clear winners (Indians) and losers (foreigners), note the same has not happened in other sectors. For example, foreign companies in personal products have not quit. Their powerful presence continues. Indian companies have not made much headway in winning market shares from multinational companies like Colgate and Hindustan Lever.

The reason foreigners have lost out in the financial services business is because they have been impatient and had a short-term view—perhaps those traits come from the nature of the financial services business itself.

संदेशखाली पीड़िताओं ने कहा भाजपा ने ज़िंदगी नर्क बना दी  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMFjDfP1if0  । Navin Kumar  May 10, 2024 
क्या प्रधानमंत्री, रक्षा मंत्री और गृह मंत्री ने देश से झूठ बोला? पीड़िता बताकर उम्मीदवार बनाया अब जवाब देते नहीं बन रहा। बंगाल की राजनीति में मोदी की मिट्टी पलीद।

In practice, democracy as a principle seldom overpowers the notion of democracy as an administrative practice. It is no different in India. Questions about the state of democracy come up only around crises of procedures like those related to elections or institutions like Parliament. Few seriously examine what values should mark democracy in a country like India where pluralism, diversity and tolerance are necessary for society to survive.

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/india-democracy-election-9316842/ 

Due to the structural inequalities of Indian society, B R Ambedkar considered democracy a value that the Constitution must protect and guarantee. Gandhi did not favour the constitutionalisation of democracy which, according to him, has to be preserved in society as an essential value. He did not want to privilege and legalise democracy as a part of constitutional morality over a traditional, social morality. In his view, it was not a part of our natural sentiment. Rather, it was artificially cultivated or externally imposed — which is in contrast to the “real” democratic tradition in India that flourished through religious co-existence.

The state’s position as “guardian of democracy” resulted in many unpleasant episodes, including the proclamation of Emergency by Indira Gandhi in 1975. What makes the present situation different from previous experiences is that the clout of certain kinds of organisations is no longer seen as abnormal. This happened during the Emergency as well – Sanjay Gandhi’s hold on the government is well-known. But the current regime has legitimised the sway of organisations like the RSS through popular means. The conditions of a working democracy may be the same for seven decades, but the principles and values have the potential to be altered.

by M H Ilia

09/05/2024