RBI to Absorb ₹25,000 Crore Liquidity from Banking System

1,573 branches across Karnataka now fall within Deepak Kaushik’s remit as Chief General Manager of State Bank of India’s Bengaluru Circle. Previously the bank’s Country Head for East Asia, he takes charge of its second-largest circle—a regional grouping whose scale makes this more than a personnel announcement.

The appointment poses a useful question for anyone building a banking career: what changes when your responsibility becomes much larger than your capacity to observe it directly? You cannot personally inspect every decision, yet the quality of those decisions remains your concern.

This is not an assessment of Kaushik’s management style or a claim about problems at SBI. It is a way to examine the job itself: leadership at this scale requires reliable information from people whose daily work the leader cannot see.

Think of someone responsible for a large network of schools. Visiting classrooms matters, but no amount of travel allows that person to watch every lesson; attendance figures and examination results help, without revealing everything about how a school works.

A banking circle presents a similar management problem. Credit disbursement, branch operations and customer service all sit within the regional leadership remit, but a total for the network cannot explain the quality of every customer interaction or lending decision.

The distinction matters for ambitious bankers below that level, too. Doing your own work well and ensuring that other people’s work is dependable are related skills, not identical ones.

Consider an illustrative allocation of ₹10,000 per branch for a staff-learning exercise—not an announced SBI budget. Across the documented 1,573 branches, the total would be ₹1,57,30,000, or ₹1.573 crore; even a modest branch-level decision becomes a substantial regional commitment.

The arithmetic is easy; evaluating the result is harder. A leader would need to know whether the exercise improved decisions, not merely whether every branch spent its allocation and recorded completion.

In our school analogy, that is the difference between distributing textbooks and establishing that pupils learned. In banking, completion records are useful, but they should not become substitutes for evidence that staff understand and apply what they have been taught.

RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra’s warning at the Kautilya Economic Conclave gives this leadership problem urgency. He stressed that financial stress can develop suddenly and take years to resolve, while geopolitical and economic factors complicate predictions about stability.

For a manager, the practical lesson is not to predict every shock. It is to shorten the distance between a problem appearing and someone with authority understanding it.

That requires more than another reporting template. A sensible leadership test is whether staff can distinguish an ordinary exception from a warning that deserves attention, and whether they know who owns the next decision.

The school-network comparison helps here as well. A regional average can remain reassuring while one school struggles; the person in charge needs both the aggregate picture and a dependable route for local concerns to reach them.

A separate housing-finance case shows why underlying records matter. The National Housing Bank has initiated a forensic audit—a detailed examination of records for possible financial misconduct—at SRG Housing Finance, covering allegations including fictitious loans, unsupported accounts and repayment discrepancies.

Those allegations are not findings of guilt. The outcome is unknown, and the case provides no basis for drawing conclusions about SBI; its relevance is the professional importance of connecting recorded business to verifiable customer and loan information.

For a banker, that connection is fundamental. Growth deserves attention, but so does the evidence behind it.

The Finance Ministry’s scheduled Tuesday meeting with bank heads brings another dimension into view: financial inclusion. The review will cover initiatives including Jan Dhan basic bank accounts and Mudra loans for small businesses, alongside insurance and entrepreneurship schemes.

The meeting is expected to assess progress. For regional managers, the leadership challenge is translating programme objectives into branch-level work without treating an aggregate achievement as a complete account of service quality.

Here the analogy returns to the classroom. Enrolment tells a school system something important about access, but leaders still need to understand the experience after admission; opening access to finance likewise creates responsibilities beyond recording the initial transaction.

If you are planning your next move in banking, this suggests a useful development priority: learn to make other people’s decisions more dependable. That means explaining standards clearly, examining exceptions carefully and making escalation a normal part of competent work.

We should judge leadership by that capacity, alongside business results. The larger your remit, the more your judgement depends on what other people feel able to tell you.