WRONG LIMITS

There are signs that the Reserve Bank of India has decided to ignore the criticism of its Malegam report and enforce its recommendations. It is expected to introduce price control on interest that microfinance institutions may charge rural borrowers. Price control gives those subjected to it an incentive to increase costs. To prevent it, the RBI will also introduce a cap on their profit margins. That will also control what they can pay for the funds they borrow. Here, the RBI is principally thinking of banks, of which it is the prime regulator. In essence, it is going to tell the banks that they cannot earn more than a certain limit on small loans to villagers.  The rate being bandied about is 12 per cent. Since the average interest earned by public sector banks on their bills and advances in 2009-10 was only 8.3 per cent, the RBI must feel that it is doing banks a favour if it lets them earn 12 per cent on rural loans. But a high proportion of government banks’ loans goes to politically favoured borrowers such as farmers, small industrialists and government enterprises; if they are excluded, the interest rate earned is considerably higher. So the RBI is likely to make banks’ rural credit no more paying than their urban commercial loans. It will thus deprive banks of all incentive to lend to villagers, who are dispersed and more expensive to service. That will perpetuate the malaise that has pervaded till now: villagers will continue to be under-served by banks. Those banks that still try out the rural market will have their costs further increased by maximum limits on the size of loans. They will also be forbidden to lend to villagers whose income exceeds a minimum; in other words, they will not be allowed to reduce their average risk by lending to more substantial farmers and traders. The net effect of these well-intentioned and ill-thought-out measures would be to leave the rural credit market to moneylenders at whose mercy villagers have been all these centuries. The RBI prides itself on being a conservative institution, but this is surely taking conservatism too far. More importantly, the RBI is a nervous regulator which puts protection of its reputation above development; it therefore prefers oligopolistic markets in which a few banks make comfortable profits. That is the market structure it has created in cities; it is determined to replicate it in villages. Viewed in this fashion, it is not just its approach to rural credit that is inimical to development; it is its stranglehold on the banks that is harmful. The country would benefit, whether in towns or in villages, from vigorous competition among a larger number of banks. If that makes the bank regulator’s job more difficult, that is an argument for redesigning the regulator.