Tantri the Mantri
Banking & NPAs / the rupee & the RBI / Jan Dhan & financial inclusion / the budget & markets / ever-greening, IBC and the odd myth busted
Prof. Prasanna Tantri — Associate Professor of Finance, ISB
Let the rupee fall.
His clearest statement of the whole thesis: a sliding rupee is mostly mechanical, not a crisis — read alongside the RBI's rate cut and the tariff noise. The same real-exchange-rate argument that runs through the Sunday sessions, made for a general audience. Read / watch →
Banking, NPAs & ever-greening
An evergreening exercise that has gone unnoticed for too long
His signature theme — how banks hide bad loans by rolling them over, and how to catch it in the data.
Why bank mergers are good for reducing NPAs
The case for consolidation — cleaner balance sheets, fewer places to hide a rotten book.
A monolithic bank like SBI: mergers may create monopolies
…and the other side of it. Where consolidation stops helping and starts concentrating power.
The flip side to bank transparency
Straight from the INFS lending-cost work — when disclosure helps borrowers, and when it doesn't.
Delayed bank recap was key to India's pre-Covid slowdown
New research, covered: starving banks of capital quietly cost the whole economy its growth.
The rupee, the RBI & inflation
Food prices and inflation expectations: should the RBI cut rates?
The expectations game, exactly as the sessions frame it — why a vegetable-price spike shouldn't move policy.
Can the RBI regulate AI without slowing innovation?
Where finance regulation meets the AI wave — the trade-off, laid out plainly.
Investors can lock in long-term rates with G-secs
The retail-investor version of the duration-matching lesson from the corporate-finance notes.
Jan Dhan, fintech & financial inclusion
The grasp of economics missing from fintech algorithms
Straight from his fintech-credit-scoring paper — models that don't understand the economy underneath.
Jan Dhan balances cross ₹2.75-lakh crore
The financial-inclusion story he has tracked for a decade, at its latest milestone.
How moving money to the bank helps the poor
One of the early ones — the consumption-smoothing case for formal banking, from his own research.
The budget, markets & a myth or two
What happens when firms have to stump up for good causes
His CSR-mandate work, in The Economist — does forcing corporate charity crowd out the voluntary kind?
A case for cash transfers in place of food grains
The recurring policy argument — put money in hands, not grain in godowns.
Foreign investors poured ~$200bn into Modi's India
Quoted internationally on capital flows and the election jitters that rattled them.
On Hindenburg's closure: it reinforces faith in Indian institutions
His read on what the short-seller's exit says about the maturity of Indian markets.
The full press list — 100-plus pieces across Livemint, Business Standard, ET, The Hindu Business Line, The Indian Express, The Economist, Bloomberg, CNN and more — lives on his ISB faculty page. These are the picks. Each headline runs a search to the original; where a piece is print-only, the clipping here is the record.