‘The Great Indian Illusion’ Carries the Receipts of Corruption in Indian Banking

A documentary on India’s banking systems in the 2020s is a daunting undertaking. Given the scale and complexity of the system, it’s impossible to condense all of it into a feature-length film without making it seem like a dry lecture in economics. How does one take a topic as dull as banking – and make it a visceral part of a citizen’s life? And how much can one simplify elementary concepts in economics, without making it seem the ‘necessary vegetables’ the audience needs? 

Varrun Sukhraj’s The Great Indian Illusion takes on the unenviable task of educating the audience on India’s economy, how it’s slowly moved away from servicing the people to caressing the elites, and how it’s often the public that ends up paying for the rich. 

Financial corruption and dishonest banking systems might be embedded in India’s fundamental foundations, but as Varrun’s film finds out – the corruption has hit dangerous levels over the last decade. And yet, there seems to be an overwhelming feeling of false bravado cloaking over-enthusiastic claims from the current government (fourth-largest economy?). And like with this establishment on most matters, there’s no accountability. 

A still from 'The Great Indian Illusion'.

Varrun's earlier films include Too Much Democracy (2023; on the 2020-21 farmers’ protests) and Jamoora (2024; chronicling Shyam Rangeela’s failed attempt to contest the general election against Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Varanasi). Backed by his regular producing partner, comedian Kunal Kamra, Varrun brings his recognisable style to the film — partly a public service announcement, partly a podcast featuring experts, and partly a vlog where he manages to get the mood on the ground. 

Using anecdotes from the last decade, Varrun’s film gives us a primer on how banking works, and how the system is twisted by the rich to fleece the system of money, which the middle-class and lower middle-class end up paying for with their savings, service charge or tax. 

Featuring journalists like P. Sainath, Sucheta Dalal and Faye D’Souza, former Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chauhan, bank employees’ union leader Devidas Tuljapurkar, former finance secretary Subhash Garg, retired economics professor V.S Kaveri and economist T.T Ram Mohan, among a few others, meant that the film has a wealth of learned perspectives. They also understood the need to explain things without using jargon to avoid alienating the audience on a crucial topic.

A still from 'The Great Indian Illusion'.

We’re explained how since the nationalisation of the banks in 1969 under Indira Gandhi, the sector has gradually leaned towards its rich, private-sector customers. The collusion reached such insidious levels and so flagrant was the corruption that several businessmen turned fugitives during the 2010s – the likes of Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi, Lalit Modi, Mehul Choksi. Most of them were willful defaulters – which means that they had means to pay, and still refused to. The loans were never recovered, simply ‘written off’, and the insurmountable losses of the bank would get absorbed by a more stable bank. This led to unprecedented consolidation over the last decade, where the numbers of banks have dwindled from 27 to 12. 

Varrun’s film feels the most visceral when we see hapless depositors protesting outside the Punjab & Maharashtra Co-operative bank (PMC), which folded in 2022 after lending nearly 73% of its total asset class, to a single entity (HDIL). Depositors lost anywhere between tens of lakhs to crores of rupees for a fraud put into motion by two HDIL promoters. However, the most chilling anecdote in the PMC episode is how a whistleblower told the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) about risky loans being given to HDI. The RBI’s response was to send a notice to PMC to look into the matter. An individual had pointed out the crime a whole decade before it took place, and yet nothing happened. Almost 300 depositors died – some of them by suicide – in the months immediately after the news of the bank’s merger with Unity Small Finance Bank. 

A still from 'The Great Indian Illusion'.

The 67-minute documentary gets too dry in the middle, when the experts explain how Development Financial Institutions (DFI) like IDBI, ICICI etc, were restructured to operate like commercial banks, and to also provide retail loans, thanks to short-sighted policy. Some of the experts speculated that these DFIs were being deliberately run to the ground, so a case could be made to privatise the sector entirely. All economists warned about the ills of having a private banking sector in a third-world country like India, where public welfare should be the goal. Tuljapurkar narrates an incident where a consortium of businessmen ordered 100 Mercedes Benz, which was funded by State Bank of India, at a special lending rate of 7%. Meanwhile, a small-scale farmer residing in a tribal region was given a loan for her tractor at 14.5%. 

Carrying the receipts of a nation’s corruption of over a decade, The Great Indian Illusion felt like it had shades of two of my favourite American films in the last decade: Charles Ferguson’s The Inside Job (2009), on the 2008 housing market financial crisis; and Adam McKay’s The Big Short (2015), based on Michael Lewis’s book by the same name, and a fictitious retelling of the 2008 crisis through four real-life hedge fund managers. 

Both films have a more imaginative visual language – Ferguson’s film uses eye-popping cinematography and excellent music to help the medicine go down. McKay’s film uses celebrity cameos by Margot Robbie and Anthony Bourdain to explain crucial finance concepts in layperson’s language. 

More didactic in its style, Varrun has a nice montage in the beginning. But seeing the stark contrast between the Ambani wedding, and a man in Odisha carrying his sister’s exhumed remains to a bank as ‘proof’ of her passing, gave me the chills. Despite its limitations, I couldn’t help but think this film really cares. 

*The Great Indian Illusion is streaming on Kunal Kamra’s YouTube channel. 

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