back to life they dont face the threat of an investigationevery finance minister says india should have large global banks what is your view on bank consolidationthere are several issues here one is the quality of management in public sector banks needs to be raised there are some very good public sector bankers but there are some not so good ones and it is not necessarily at the top that the problem lies new capabilities are also needed in the middle management the argument for mergers may be that good banks can uplift less good banks i feel mergers are always better done at a time when the banks are relatively clean and the management can spend time on the merger process which is never easy especially if banks have strong cultures so to bring together a bank for example which has largely been in north india with one from the east will bring together cultures that will take some time to adjust to each other what is important is to ensure that you dont double the problem by bringing the wrong banks together the second concern expressed at various gyan sangams is whether the banks are in fact all following the same strategy and unfortunately so long as strategy is determined in north block it will always be the same so one of the moves that this government has taken which has to be taken to its logical conclusion is to appoint boards that are more independent which are more capable and cut the strings between the boards and the government the joint secretary in the ministry of finance should not be able to summon a board member or a ceoafter the departure of niti aayog vice chairman arvind panagariya there is talk that people who come from abroad arent as dedicated to serving india as homegrown folks and that the government should be careful about appointing such people in important posts your viewsthere are people who think sometimes fairly that those who come from abroad jump to positions that they themselves would like they question their capabilities and say oh they dont know india and therefore will make wrong decisions i think that there are circumstances where an intimate knowledge of india is necessary in order to make the right decisions and there are certain circumstances in which you can make the right decisions only because you are not trapped in a mindset that resists change i think anybody who is sensible and who comes from abroad will take the wealth of experience that exists in their colleagues their subordinates their superiors and make decisions based on that as i said in the book i never actually decided things on my own i used to ask my colleagues to contribute and invariably the decisions that came from discussions at senior management meetings were better than what i individually might have taken or hopefully what they might have taken without my inputs i think we should take the best