?The feeling is like coming first in class but it also casts a big responsibility on you to keep up the performance. Others should work hard to achieve this kind of recognition?, KR Kamath, chairman & managing director of Punjab National Bank, put it effusively about winning the top spot among nationalised banks at the FE Best Banks Survey 2010.

Kamath couldn?t be more accurate. In the past eleven years the FE Best Banks Survey has become the barometer to judge excellence in Indian banking.

The award winners this year have proved that, once again. In many ways action in the banking space is beginning to hot up, with the implementation of a new base rate system, the government?s intent to give new licences and the use of mobile technology for financial inclusion. And the FE Best Banks Survey tracks this feverish action from the standpoint of some of India?s best bankers.

Aditya Puri, Kalpana Morparia, Shikha Sharma and KR Kamath discuss the future of Indian banking in the pages of the FE Best Banks magazine this morning. Everyone, for instance, is convinced about the huge opportunity opening up in rural India that can be linked with the advantages of mobile technology.

No wonder MD Mallya, the chief of Bank of Baroda, said, ?I think Financial Express has been doing a great of job of surveying banks and their performance. The awards recognise the good work that banks do.?

The good work Mallya talks about is the efforts the Indian banking sector is making to fund the global ambitions of Indian Inc and yet cater to the banking needs of an additional 400 million rural Indians. All this will doubtless result in a substantial scaling up of banking in India.

The debate over creating a few Indian banks that rank among the top ten in Asia is not a new one. But it has assumed fresh urgency in the context of the balance of economic power rapidly shifting towards Asia. God forbid, if there is another financial meltdown and a double-dip recession in the West, India will need banks of the size and scale that will keep feeding the growing domestic economy. The real macro-economic challenge is of garnering another 10% of GDP as savings over the next decade. Banks have a big role in realising this objective.

This is the theme of FE Best Banks Survey this time around. The survey has also introduced another critical parameter to assess the strength and stability of banks. Besides the usual benchmarks like total assets, networth, capital adequacy and profitability, it has introduced the test of liquidity, which measures how well a bank is placed to meet its liabilities with current assets. It is the test to use, especially in the aftermath of the financial crisis.