is what you need to do to tackle the black money problemto what do you attribute this consistent demand for lower rate of interest now even from the current chief economic adviserthis tension exists in every country which is why you dont ask the finance ministry to set interest rates you delegate it to a central bank the whole idea of an inflation committee is really to give it a structure by saying dear government please tell us what you want in terms of inflation and even go ahead and appoint three experts who you think are sensible and take appropriate decisions and let them join with rbi people and let the collective determine what the interest rate should be youve included a speech in which you talk about the number of bad loans made in 200708 do you think it was lazy banking that led to defaulters such as vijay mallya as i mentioned in the book it was a period of irrational exuberance in india a lot of projects had succeeded and this made bankers willing to take on new projects with higher leverage and less promoter equity there was also poor assessment of projects and undoubtedly some corruption now the regulator is not a commercial banker and can potentially raise concerns about whether appropriate assessments have been done but the regulator really comes into the act when the losses start showing one of the issues i pointed out in one of my speeches was that credit growth by public sector banks had been slowing down since 2014 way before the strong balance sheet cleanup was initiated and this because banks were seeing the problem on their balance sheets to some extent it was necessary to force the cleanup and the recapitalisation so that they could move forward and cleanup does not mean liquidate the asset but put it back on track with the right capital structure now i do think that there has been a lot of hesitancy in various quarters among bankers and to some extent in the authorities to speed up the pace of cleanup for fear that some of the people who perpetrated the mischief will go scotfree we should separate the two issues from a national perspective putting assets back on track and letting them be revived is extremely important that creates jobs it creates growth separately we have to beef up the quality of investigation so that people who made away with money that didnt belong to them are caught quickly and brought to justice those are two separate issues just because there is some fear that the promoter has misappropriated money doesnt mean that his factory or his power plant should have a stigma take the power plant away do what is necessary to put it back on track bring in new management if necessary and deal with his shenanigans separately through the investigative authorities try and ensure that anytime the bankers make a concession in order to bring a plant