Letters to the editor

Letter of the Week AwardThe ‘newspaper-active reader relationship’ is of enormous significance for a serious publication. A good l...

Letter of the Week Award

The ‘newspaper-active reader relationship’ is of enormous significance for a serious publication. A good letter, especially a good letter that critiques us, is of immense value. It is to recognise this and to encourage quality reader intervention that The Indian Express has instituted the Letter of the Week Award. We now announce and publish every Saturday the reader intervention our editors deem the best. Selection will be from letters received that week. Letters should be e-mailed

to letters.editpage@expressindia.com or sent to The Indian Express, 9&10, Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, New Delhi -110002. Letter writers will have to give their postal address with every contribution.

Story continues below this ad

The winner receives books worth Rs 1,000 and his letter gets pride of the place in these columns as well as on our website.

Amchi Mumbai

• READING the report about a high-powered committee’s recommendations to make Mumbai an international financial centre (IE, April 3), I could not help experiencing a deja vu. Mumbai will never be a world class metropolis for the simple reason that the charlatans who govern us do not want it to be so. Think about it. One of the report’s recommendations is that the BMC be disbanded and the city’s administration be handed over to an elected or appointed ‘city management’. Can anyone, in their wildest imagination, conceive any political party allowing that? If roads and flyovers are constructed to last for 25 years, repair contracts would soon dry up. And fewer contracts mean fewer kick-backs. That is not how things work in our commercial capital. Mumbai is many things to many people, but to our corporators, legislators and sundry public officials, it has always been the mother of all milch cows. Jai Maharashtra!

— Firoze Hirjikaka, Mumbai

Incorrect story

• WE refer to the report entitled, ‘ICICI bank CEO, seven others booked for dacoity’ (IE, March 31). The report was a PTI story. We would like to point out that both the headline and article are incorrect. The correct factual position is as follows: a complaint leveling certain allegations has been made in the Court of Judicial Magistrate, First Class Court No 2, Nagpur, against ICICI Bank and some of its senior officials. The magistrate has merely ordered police investigation into the matter. The investigation process is under way and ICICI Bank is fully cooperating with the authorities in this regard. Legally, the ordering of investigation is not tantamount to charges being framed by the police or magistrate; nor is it tantamount to the said officials or the bank being “booked” or “charged”. Booking and charging can result only after completion of the police investigation and framing of charges, which is not the case here. Banks have well-recognised rights, both in terms of judicial pronouncements and statutes such as the Transfer of Property Act, 1882 or the Securitisation & Reconstruction of Financial Assets & Enforcement of Security Interest Act, 2002, of being able to repossess security furnished by its borrowers without intervention of the courts. ICICI Bank in undertaking repossession of security furnished to it, without the intervention of the courts, does so in the complete compliance of norms laid down by itself, the Indian Banks’ Associations and the Reserve Bank of India.

— Charudatta Deshpande; Head, Corporate Communications, ICICI Bank