India runs two very different rulebooks on public accountability, and the distance between them keeps growing harder to explain. On August 25, banks wrote off almost the entire value, nearly 99.97% of about Rs 22,000 crore in claims tied to a media baron. Government sources later clarified that this was not a personal loan the media baron took, but claims against him as a guarantor for loans borrowed by several firms. Now, a five-member bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) today (September 1) stayed the August 25 order.Whatever the fine print, one thing won’t happen: you will not see the names of the media baron or his company flashed on an airport or railway screen as part of a public shaming drive. That kind of exposure is reserved for people much smaller than him.Look at how India treats minor offences. Traffic police in Tirupati use CCTV footage to publish violators’ names and vehicle numbers on YouTube. In Noida, authorities have suspended the licences of repeat offenders and put up their names at the very spot where they broke the law. In Gurugram, an AI system rolled out in 2026 now flashes a vehicle’s pending fines on public screens at traffic signals for everyone around to see.The same approach runs through civic enforcement. Tinsukia in Assam runs a “Hall of Shame,” posting CCTV photos of people accused of urinating or littering in public. Morbi does the same on hoardings. Panchkula proposed putting the names of people caught in open defecation on its website; Ulhasnagar proposed their photos on billboards.Villages in Nadia district once built literal walls naming residents caught urinating in public. In 2020, Uttar Pradesh’s Adityanath government put up large posters across Lucknow naming anti-CAA rioters, along with their photographs and the exact amount they owed the state for the damage they caused. Across states, governments and years, the pattern repeats: the state treats naming people publicly as a normal, acceptable way to enforce discipline.That confidence vanishes the moment the offenders start wearing suits and the numbers start running into crores. Every year, Indian banks report bad loans and write-offs worth tens of thousands of crores, but the public almost always sees only the totals – big numbers with no names attached, no clarity on who caused the loss, how much was actually owed, or why a particular settlement was considered fair.Also read: Subhash Chandra Case: NCLT Order Indicates Last NCLT President Took Five Months to Appoint Third MemberThis is not a minor detail. Public-sector banks are ultimately answerable to taxpayers, and even private banks depend on the trust of millions of depositors. When such vast sums disappear, citizens are left to dig through insolvency filings, stock exchange disclosures, court orders and scattered government paperwork just to understand what actually happened. The 2019 amendment to the Motor Vehicles Act made this principle official for traffic offences – it allowed the names of certain repeat violators to be made public, especially when their licences were cancelled. The law itself accepted that public exposure could be a legitimate way to stop dangerous driving. Compare that with 2017, when the Reserve Bank of India told the Supreme Court it could not reveal the identities of major loan defaulters, warning that doing so could seriously hurt their businesses.The same gap shows up around subsidies. India runs incentive schemes worth enormous sums to boost manufacturing and investment, yet there is no simple way for a citizen to check which company received how much, what it promised to build, how many jobs it promised to create, or whether it kept those promises. There isn’t even a public list of the directors of these companies and their photographs, the way public data exists for other things.Contrast this with India’s food distribution system, where a national platform lets citizens track exactly which household received subsidised grain, how much, and when. The state has built the machinery to track a bag of subsidised rice reaching a village family – but nothing similar exists to track subsidised capital reaching a company or its boardroom.The contradiction gets sharper when the state actively celebrates a different kind of financial identity. The Economic Survey of 2018-19 suggested publicly honouring India’s top taxpayers – airport privileges, even buildings and roads named after them. The survey also suggested public shaming of individuals who don’t pay taxes to “reduce non-compliance if they are reintegrated immediately.” However, it added that persistent public shaming can be detrimental to compliance because of stigmatisation effects.This proves the real point: the state isn’t fundamentally against making financial identity public. It simply picks and chooses when transparency suits it. Pay a lot of tax, and you get a spotlight. Receive a large public subsidy, and you get barely any scrutiny. Default on a big public-sector bank loan, and you get the most protection of all.None of this means every defaulting businessman should be turned into a public spectacle, or that a failed business automatically proves wrongdoing. Allegations are not convictions, and due process matters. But once wilful default or fraud has actually been proven by a competent authority, the case for disclosure only gets stronger and it should scale with the size of the money involved.A Rs 1000 traffic fine and a Rs 1000 crore bank exposure cannot be judged by the same yardstick of privacy. Real transparency doesn’t need humiliation – it simply means publishing details of large wilful defaulters once due process is complete, disclosing big loan settlements above a set threshold along with what was recovered and what was written off, and building a public dashboard for major subsidy schemes that tracks what was promised against what was actually delivered.India already accepts, as everyday administrative practice, that visibility can act as a deterrent – it uses this logic daily against motorists, litterers and those accused of open defecation. What nobody has explained is why that same logic disappears the moment the sums involved move from thousands of rupees to thousands of crores.A citizen who dumps garbage on the street can end up as a photograph on an LED screen. A motorist with unpaid fines can have his vehicle number flashed publicly at a signal. But a corporate loan written off in the thousands of crores usually ends up as nothing more than a line item in an accounting report.Why not display the names and photographs of proven wilful defaulters at airport lounges, railway stations and metro stations? Why not publicly identify proven tax evaders on metro and other public displays? And why is there no comprehensive public dashboard showing the companies receiving government subsidies, the amount they receive, their promoters and board of directors, and whether they have fulfilled their investment and employment commitments? Suchak Patel is an independent writer.