In the Rajya Sabha’s Zero Hour session on Wednesday, Congress MP Neeraj Dangi took to the floor to complain that the present deposit‑insurance ceiling of ₹5 lakh, set by the Deposit Insurance and Credit Guarantee Corporation (DICGC), is woefully inadequate. He urged the government to lift the limit to at least ₹25 lakh for every depositor without delay.
“Should any commercial or cooperative bank collapse, all kinds of deposits—savings, current, fixed or recurring—are covered only up to ₹5 lakh, no matter how much a customer has actually put in. Anything above that stays the depositor’s sole risk,” Dangi said. He noted that the ₹5 lakh cap, imposed on Feb 4 2020 after the Punjab & Maharashtra Co‑operative Bank (PMC Bank) crisis, had previously been ₹1 lakh for decades, according to the latest DICGC report (March 2024).
He added that out of the 1,497 insured banks, merely 43.8 percent of the total deposits fall within the current coverage, leaving a staggering 56.2 percent completely uninsured. “Most of those uninsured funds belong to senior citizens and the elderly who entrust their life‑long savings to banks for security,” he said. “If one large urban cooperative or a small‑finance bank were to fail, thousands of elderly people’s hard‑earned money could vanish in an instant.”
Dangi cited the year‑long turmoil of 2023‑24, during which 431 urban cooperative banks either failed or were under severe distress. In the PMC‑Bank‑style debacle, the DICGC had to pay about ₹17,000 crore to thousands of depositors. “The insurance premium—currently 0.12 percent of deposits, paid by the banks and not the customers—must remain a bank expense. Raising the insurance ceiling would restore public confidence in the banking system,” he urged.
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In the same session, Shiv Sena (UBT) Rajya Sabha MP Priyanka Chaturvedi highlighted the growing scourge of food adulteration and counterfeit drugs, describing it as a “national health emergency that is claiming innocent lives every day.” She reiterated that she had already written to the Union Health Minister on the matter and again appealed to the House, stressing that the spread of tainted cough syrups and sub‑standard medicines has become unmanageable.
“The contamination of cough syrups is killing infants who are being prescribed them by doctors, and the market is flooded with low‑quality medicines,” she said. “Likewise, the widespread adulteration of food is linked to cancer cases across the country. We need stricter enforcement and punitive measures against those ignoring health norms.”
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