Going by how he has made one of the toughest jobs in the country look easy, it’s not surprising that Dinesh Khara’s favourite book is Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. The former State Bank of India (SBI) chairman was always a fan of the management stream, but after earning a degree at the Faculty of Management Studies of the Delhi School of Economics, he decided he would become a banker.
Today, even after four years at the corner office of India’s biggest bank, Khara feels he has a lot left in him. In particular, he misses not having spent enough time on data analytics at the bank because of the heavy daily workload, and would love to work with fintechs.
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The pulls and pressures of running a big bank, especially the frequent travel, can take their toll. But Khara is able to manage with just 5-6 hours of sleep possibly because he rarely misses his morning yoga and meditation routine. But staying fit also means Khara has had to “give up his sweet tooth” and his mother’s besan laddoos. He keeps his diet simple: dal, roti, sabzi and of course, his favourite, rajma chawal.
He attributes much of the capability needed to run India’s biggest bank to in-house training or learning on the job. The varied experience across the country’s many branches, he believes, prepares one to deal with all kinds of situations. He recalls his first posting in Jaipur in the days of manual ledgers and the “heavy savings bank counters” where he cut his teeth. In Bahalgarh, Haryana, where the SBI branch was the only pucca building, he had to fight a case to ensure the staff were not evicted from the office. His most challenging stint was in Chhattisgarh’s Raipur at a time when the Naxal movement was at its peak.
Each of these environments helped him hone his skills. Khara recalls how, in Chhattisgarh, he visited the branches across the state trying to boost the morale of the officers and keep the operations going. An out-and-out people’s person, SBI insiders admire his even temperament. When the bank’s operations were being digitalised, Khara was able to convince many a reluctant officer to embrace technology.
Khara was also able to motivate the team at SBI Mutual Fund, resulting in a doubling of the assets under management (AUM) during his tenure. During his chairmanship, SBI fared exceedingly well, notching up a growth in net profit of anywhere between 22% and 59%. Critically, the return on assets (RoA), which was 0.4% in FY20, more than doubled to 1% by FY24, while the return on equity (RoE) improved from 6.4% to 17.3%. Khara was also able to lower the net non-performing loans to just 0.6% in FY24 from 2.2% in FY20. At the same, the business grew meaningfully; net loans and advances at the end of FY24 were 37 lakh crore, while the total assets were nudging62 lakh crore.
For an unblemished career and a sterling performing as the SBI chairman, the FE Best Banks jury has conferred on Khara the Lifetime Achievement Award.
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