The average drawing room conversation on the government encroaching on the independence of the RBI tut-tuts over the good guys at the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) getting stamped on by a bully government. Now, the resignation of Urjit Patel has added fuel to the views fire. But I wonder if the conversation would change if the same groups realized what this ‘independence’ or its obverse, the lack of accountability, means to their money. Last week, the RBI announced that new floating rate home loans from banks would be benchmarked to a rate not controlled by banks from April 1 2019. Anybody who has taken a floating rate loan in India knows that as the interest rate cycle goes up, loan rates mostly go up very quickly, but the opposite does not happen. This is not a new problem. I remember flagging the issue more than 15 years ago. It is not as if the RBI has not been aware of the problem of benchmark fixing by banks to cheat retail home loan borrowers. RBI has changed the way the rate is calculated four times in the past 24 years to make it difficult for banks to fix the rate—starting with the Prime Lending Rate (PLR) in 1994 to the Marginal Cost of Funds lending Rate (MCLR) in 2016. But in each case the power to calculate and fix the rate remained with the banks. A power they have mis-used freely at your expense. An internal RBI committee found that banks fixed rates at will.