Tamal Bandyopadhyay

Tamal Bandyopadhyay is an Indian business journalist, known for his weekly column on banking and finance Banker's Trust published in Mint, an Indian business daily brought out by HT Media Ltd. He has authored three books namely Bandhan: The Making of a Bank, Sahara: The Untold Story and A Bank for the Buck.^[1]

Life and career

A student of English Literature (a postgraduate from Calcutta University), Tamal Bandyopadhyay began his career in journalism as a Trainee Journalist with Times of India, in Mumbai in 1985. Subsequently, he has worked with four national financial dailies - The Economic Times, Financial Express and Business Standard, besides Mint.

He is one of the members of the team that founded Mint in February 2007.

Currently, he is associated with Mint as a Consulting Editor. His immediate past assignment was with Mint as a Deputy Managing Editor and before that he was Deputy Resident Editor of Business Standard in Mumbai. He has also been associated with Bandhan Bank Ltd as adviser since August 2014. Headquartered in Kolkata, Bandhan is one of the two entities that got the Reserve Bank of India nod to become a universal bank and started its operations as a bank on 23 August 2015. This is the first instance of a microfinance company converting into a bank in India.

He is popular for his weekly column on banking and finance called Banker's Trust which is published every Monday. His frequent blog Banker's Trust Real Time on www.livemint.com analyses major developments in the financial sector.^[2]

Between April and November 2011, he ran a 32 episode series on Bloomberg India TV, called Banker's Trust, where senior central bankers, commercial bankers and economists were interviewed every week.^[3]

Releasing Tamal's first book, A Bank for the Buck, in November 2012, then finance minister P Chidambaram said, "In a period of great financial illiteracy, it's refreshing to have a book written by somebody very literate about matters relating to finance". In his foreword to the book, former governor of Reserve Bank of India, YV Reddy, wrote, "It's a sort of recent oral history of a financial institution. Tamal has set a new trend in the dissemination of knowledge."^[4]

Tamal's second book, Sahara: The Untold Story, details the beginnings and the current day working of the secretive Sahara India Parivar.^[5] Well researched, with umpteen interviews with people concerned including Subroto Roy, the book was also cause of a stay order later requested by the Sahara group.

In December 2013, the Sahara India Pariwar, moved Calcutta High Court, got a stay on the publication of the book and filed a Rs 2 billion defamation suit against the author and its publisher, Jaico Publishing House.^[6] In April 2014, both the parties reached an out of court settlement following which the book carries a disclaimer by Sahara which says, among other things, the book has "defamatory content" --something unprecedented in Indian publishing history, as narrated in Sue the Messenger by Subir Ghosh, with Paranjoy Guha Thakurta. ^[7]

He has also published a book of poems in Bengali Anupam Meenrashi in January 2014.

Tamal Bandyopadhyay is also a contributor to The Oxford Companion to Economics in India, edited by Kaushik Basu.^[8]

In his foreword to his latest book, Bandhan: The Making of a Bank, Kaushik Basu, chief economist of the World Bank, has written, "Tamal Bandyopadhyay is a gifted story teller, who combines the sharp vision of a finance expert with the journalist's skill for observation and narration."

Bibliography

• A Bank for the Buck (2012)
• Anupam Meenrashi (2014)
• Sahara: The Untold Story (2014)
• Bandhan: The Making of a Bank (2016)

References