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During a discussion on public debt management here on Thursday, the member of the Public Accounts Committe of Parliament criticised the Centre for not creating a centralised centralised data base of all internal and external liabilities of the government.
The panel had called RBI Governor Urjit Patel and other senior officials of the Finance Ministry to brief it on their roles in public debt management.
The panel said though the issue was considered over four years ago when the Working Group on Debt Management had suggested that the steps should be initiated to develop Middle Office’s own data base with the help of National Informatics Centre (NIC), there was no centralised data available, a member told BusinessLine .
The members said it was also proposed that the Commonwealth Secretariat’s Debt Recording and Management System (CS-DRMS) be adopted as a temporary arrangement.
“It has been brought out by audit that the requisite amount for conducting a system requirement study could not be released to NIC because of delayed processing of invoice. In the meanwhile, CS-DRMS had also not been adopted as a temporary measure in line with the proposal of the Working Group. There were questions about this,” a member said.
Members also noted that to encourage participation of medium and small investors in the primary market for Government securities, a scheme of non-competitive bidding for allotment of up to five per cent of the notified amount in the specified auctions of dated securities at weighted average rate of accepted bids was introduced in January 2002.
But the total amount of the bids received and accepted in respect of retail investors during the period from 2009-10 to 2014-15 ranged from 0.30 per cent to 0.47 per cent of the notified amount.
“In other words, during the period from 2009-10 to 2014-15, out of ₹1.53 lakh crore, the non-competitive bids received were only to the extent of ₹10,719 crore. Even though the RBI seems to have initiated many steps to augment the retailers participation, it did not make any impact at the field level,” another member said.
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