 not believe in central bank independence. I think it's a neoliberal construct. I don't think it is something that we as those who actually wish for progressive economic policies should be furthering or supporting in any way. Central bank independence is something that was described from the mid to late 1980s as an instrument to make monetary policy entirely focused on controlling inflation. Rather than have a multiple set of objectives like employment generation, productivity increase, more greater financial inclusion, etc. So I do not believe in central bank independence. Let me be very clear on this. Nor do I believe that you can separate monetary policy from any other government policies. So the idea that you know you have the central bank, which is full of technocrats who understand things better than others and who are going to do their own thing without political accountability, I think is unacceptable. Having said that, there is a case for autonomy for sure. And that autonomy is important for all institutions. And that autonomy in the central bank in India we know was dead certainly in November 2016 when demonetization was announced, because it was very clear at that time that this was a decision taken against the wishes of the RBI, imposed on the RBI, which then had to implement something which it did very badly, which it had absolutely no knowledge of and no preparation for. So my concern is not really about whether the India central bank is independent or not, but really what is done in terms of the policies. And I believe that both the central bank and the government need to be accountable. What is really the problem in India today is that we have a completely unaccountable government. We have a government without accountability in any of its decisions, of course in the other decisions, but certainly also in economic policy decisions. And the economic mess we are in also partly stems from that. Now, that's the context in which I see this transfer of funds. Let me confess, I do not think that this is a loot of the RBI. I believe that this is something the Jalan committee recommended a certain range 5.5 to 6.5% of the balance sheet to be kept as reserves. The RBI decided to go with the lower range of that because it suits the government. So yes, absolutely the RBI was doing the government's will. If it were a case of an accountable government, I would have no problems with that. The RBI therefore chose the lower range and managed to get a larger amount of the reserves transferred. Now, what does this actually mean? What does this transfer of money mean? Remember, this is not the foreign exchange reserves being transferred. Those cannot be transferred according to the Jalan committee's recommendations. It is the contingency reserves that I kept for various things that you could argue 5.5 maybe a little low, but it is the international standard. It's not in that sense a big deal. The critical issue here is what does the reserve business mean? Supposing the RBI suddenly needs more liquidity, more resources, what can it do? Well, it can print money. So let me remind you, macroeconomically speaking, there is zero difference between transferring RBI reserves and printing money. There's absolutely no difference. And what we used to call the monetized deficit, if you remember, early days when we, before Mr. Manmohan Singh abolished that notion and said we're not going to do it anymore, we used to have a monetized deficit. A certain part of government finances that was not met through various revenues, taxes, and other things was done by printing money, deficit financing as it was called. And that monetized deficit was the government borrowing from the central bank money that it printed at a relatively low interest rate. What is happening today? In those days, the government borrowed from the central bank a certain amount. Now the central bank is handing over some money to the government. Macroeconomically speaking, there is no difference. Now, I personally am not opposed to a monetized deficit. I've always believed that that imposition that we cannot have a monetized deficit is also part of a neoliberal thinking, which says that you can never monetize deficits because it will always be inflationary. We know that is not true. We know that when you have excess capacity, when you have unemployment, when the economy is in a downturn, you can actually print money without being inflationary. So if the concern is that this will be inflationary, I don't believe that is a concern either. So in terms of purely the transfer of resources from the RBI to the government, it's true that previous RBI governors have opposed it, who also, by the way, believe in central bank independence, which I do not, even though they went along with demonetization, but anyway. Many deputy governors, etc., have said that you cannot do this without infringing on the autonomy and so on. I don't think that that is the big issue. The big issue really is what is done with this money. Just like the big issue should be what is done with all money that the government spends. That is what we, as trade unions, as progressives, as people who want something good to come out of economic policy, that's the question we should be asking. What's going to happen to this big transfer? And I think Paranjaya already mentioned that there's this kind of remarkable similarity of numbers. It turns out that the government was basically lying in the budget. Now that should have been a basic major outcry, right? You can't lie to parliament, surely. But it was openly lying to parliament. It was openly declaring tax revenues that it had not received and that it knew it had not received. It was openly declaring expenditures that we don't know whether they've made or not. But according to the provisional actuals of the CGA, they have not made. So it was openly lying. But that lying, that discrepancy, came to 1.67 lakh crore. So very close to 1.7, okay? That difference last year. Now what did they do in this budget that they presented in July? They said they pretended that in fact they had got that full amount. They knew that they hadn't got as much as 1.67 lakh crore, which is something like 1.3% of GDP, a huge amount. They pretended they've got that money in the previous year and they said we are going to increase tax revenues by a further 14%. Okay? That is the projection in this budget that they're going to be another 14% increase in tax revenues. Now that's not going to happen, obviously. In fact, they're not going to even meet the level that they hoped to last year because they had already massively overestimated what they were going to get last year because they have made a complete mess of the GST. And because, as Poranjoy also mentioned, the demonetization continues to impact not just the informal economy, but now also the formal economy. The continuous stagnation of wages, the decline in agricultural incomes, the terrible impact the demonetization had, and now GST has had, have all actually meant that the economies in terrible shape, tax collections are not going to improve. They're going to be much lower. So what will this money do? It is basically going to dress up the budget. That's basically all it will do. Frankly, it will not even dress up the budget that much because in the same budget where they were pretending they're going to get 14% over that inflated number of last year, they have also already provisioned 90,000 crores of money from the RBI. They've already provisioned that amount. So the additional amount they're getting is only about 80,000 crores, which is not that much and is not going to meet their revenue shortfalls. So when Nirmala Sitaraman says we cannot tell you where the money will go, she's in a way kind of being honest. She knows it's going to go into that bottomless pit, which is the massive deficit that they have created because they have messed up public finances like no government before them. So I think the real problem with all of this is that it is yet another indicator of the compulsive dishonesty of this government. Instead of saying clearly that this is equivalent to deficit financing because we are basically adding to government resources in a situation where we are not able to make it up with our revenue collection, I mean that's really what it is. And macroeconomically speaking it's exactly the same in terms of impact. It's just that now we're also steeped in the neoliberal mindset that deficit financing is like this big crime, you can't do it and financial markets will be unhappy. So you have to pretend you're not doing that, that the RBI is giving you out of the goodness of its heart, it's giving you some money. Instead of coming clean on that, they're positioning it in this way and further messing up our public finances. That is my real problem with this funds transfer. This is how I would see this. Having said that I do want to add one more thing about issues related to the RBI in banking, which I just came across today. I know it's not part of today's discussion, but it is so important that I think an audience like this needs to just bear it in mind. It is an article in the Indian Express today on the Interministerial Panel on Fintech. I don't know if any of you saw this report in the Indian Express, but basically what this panel has suggested is that they should now allow virtual banks and prepare for a possible future scenario where banks do not need to set up branches, but they can deliver full-scale banking services from extending loans, saving accounts, issuing cards, offering payment services through their app or website. In other words, what we're seeing now in terms of bank mergers, they may not lead to job losses today, but obviously banks are now going to be pushed to a situation where even the diminishing number of banks' branches will be further cut and everybody will be encouraged to move to virtual banking. Why does this matter? It's already happening. I had the occasion, somebody I know, a domestic worker in my campus, needed to actually get an ATM card because she was told that she will incur bank charges on every withdrawal she makes otherwise. So she went to get an ATM card and she was told where the pin, she got her ATM card, she applied for it. She was told that the pin can only come to her from an OTP on her mobile phone. She said, I don't have a mobile phone. And they say, well, too bad. Link it with a mobile phone because otherwise your bank account, you will not get an OTP and you cannot use your ATM. What does this mean for all the millions of people across India who do not have mobile phones? There's still 40% of the population. What does it mean for those who cannot access or where connectivity is so poor, including in my campus, where you don't get the OTP half the time? What does it mean in Kashmir where they have no communications for a month? What are we doing in terms of forcing people into using technologies that can be turned off at the whim of the government and making all your transactions dependent on that and making you your ability to access your own money dependent on that? There's a further scary thing that this report has suggested. I just want to bring your attention to that. They have suggested that the RBI may consider making available banking data such as transaction and accounts history data for use by the financial sector, including FinTech firms. They are going to sell your personal data to FinTech firms so that they can actually use that to become more efficient apparently in the provision of financial services. So you will force everybody on to digital platforms. You will then allow the banks, the RBI will then allow the banks to make this available to other FinTech firms. All your financial and personal data will be freely available and sold to the highest bidder for use as they see fit. It goes further. It says usage of a common FinTech platform for mudra loans, small saving schemes, pension schemes and provident funds and creating a common digital platform for all micro pension schemes and government pension schemes including EPF. Everything is going to be linked to this. Now why is this so scary? Because it's not just the possible misuse. It's not just the denial of the lack of access, issues of inclusion. All of these of course exist hugely but it is the possibility that a hostile government can turn you off completely as a financial being, as an economic being if they so desire. We are now centralizing all of this information. We are forcing everybody on to digital financial platforms in which our public sector banks will be forced to actually be part of this and anyway they won't have branches to go to so they will have to increasingly move to this kind of virtual banking and then we are making that data available to everybody. Of course the government already has it for use as they see fit. You can see in China this is already done to target dissidents those with an adverse social media profile and so on and so forth. You can imagine the possibilities here. This is going to happen because it is an interministerial group that has recommended it and it doesn't require any changes in the law. So you can imagine that this is a huge threat to our banking which the RBI will be complicit in and I think banking unions should be among those that take this up in a very major way. Thank you.