New Delhi: Hitting out at the ruling party over unprecedented rise in bank frauds during the Modi regime, Congress on Monday claimed bank frauds have increased manifold during the tenure of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Citing the annual report of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the party spokesperson Gourav Vallabh alleged that the Centre has weakened the banking system by allowing fraudsters to either continue functioning or leave the country without making any efforts to recover the fraud amounts.
Talking to reporters, Vallabh said that the Centre has also not provided enough capital support to the banks.
"The Congress urges that the Modi government handles these fraudsters with an iron fist and make sure that the entire amount, which belongs to our nation, be recovered as soon as possible," he demanded.
He said that one of the important parts of the annual report of the RBI was the data around cases of bank frauds. "The cases and amount of bank fraud has been on a rampant rise since 2014-15 as in the year total bank frauds of Rs 19,455 crore were reported through 4,639 incidents," he said, adding that total bank frauds climbed to Rs 1.38-lakh crore alone in the year 2020-21 through 7,363 incidents of bank frauds in the country.
As per Vallabh, the average fraud amount increased from Rs 10.5 crore in 2018-19 to Rs 21.3 crore in 2019-20 to Rs 18.8 crore in 2020-21.
"The average fraud amount was Rs 4.2 crore in 2014-15. Hence, the average fraud amount has increased 4 times during PM Modi's first tenure and its increased to 5 times in the second regime of the PM," he said.
"Why has the government failed to curb the bank frauds in the last seven years? What is the government doing to recover the amount involved in these bank frauds? How much amount has been collected from these fraudsters who are weakening our banking system?," he asked.