They were to come in 2011, they didn't. Will the elusive new bank licences ever come? Will it be a loss for the system if these new banks don't come up soon, or will it be a better place without them? If the optimism prevalent at the beginning of the year remained, then not having a bank licence would be a great opportunity lost. But with the slide in entrepreneurial spirit, many are thanking their stars that they did not have had to lock in hundreds of crores of rupees in capital with little business to show. To be fair to the Reserve Bank of India, it came out with the draft guidelines. The government, which is hardly able to push through any legislation, has to be blamed for not making it happen. Is that all? Even if the government is able to pass the required legislation for the RBI to begin issuing new licences, there may not be many takers. Thanks to the stringent guidelines, many entrepreneurs would choose to be just borrowers in these times of stress rather than risk their own capital. Enthusiastic investors were lapping up any stock with a potential to turn into a bank, including Shriram Transport and even Reliance Capital, after Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee revealed in the last budget speech that new licences are round the corner. "The Indian banking system has emerged unscathed from the crisis," Mukherjee had said. "We need to ensure that the banking system grows in size and sophistication to meet the needs of a modern economy." The draft guidelines seek to attract only serious players and they may not enthuse entrepreneurs who want to make a quick buck, or have an eye on the huge deposits they could access for their businesses. More than anything else, the lessons of credit crisis (not the current one, but 2008's) have made RBI design the guidelines in such a way that there is little scope to make banking a casino as it happened in the West. Going by the rumours in the cocktail circuit, neither the potential bank promoters nor the central bank is feeling the absence of new banks. Will 2012 be a new dawn, or are we just waiting for Godot?
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