New Delhi: Piyush Goyal and Opposition leaders were caught in a bitter exchange in the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday when the finance minister dismissed media reports about a surge in resident Indians' deposits with Swiss banks.

Reports had last month cited statistics from the Swiss National Bank to indicate a dramatic 50 per cent year-on-year rise in such deposits to CHF 1.01 billion (over Rs 7,000 crore) in 2017, bucking a three-year downtrend.

Opposition leaders bristled when Goyal suggested that certain eminent MPs had been unable to assimilate and understand the statistics put out by the Swiss central bank.

Sinha implied that the media reports were misleading and that the criticism of the Narendra Modi government for failing to tackle the menace of black money was based on a poor understanding of figures.

" Iss desh ke bade bade neta aur varisht sansadgan bhi analyse nahi kar sakte aur samajh nahi pate (some of the country's big leaders and senior parliamentarians are unable to analyse or understand these figures),"Goyal said.

He told the MPs that he had got in touch with Swiss central bank authorities immediately after reading these reports to find an explanation for this sudden surge in deposits by Indian residents.

The finance minister claimed that the SNB data had encapsulated the deposits made by all Indians in the branches of Swiss banks across the world.

" Ho sakta hai ki vah Swiss bank ka khata Bharat ki kissi branch mein bhi ho. Ho sakta hai vah vishwa bhar mein kahin bhi ho, kissi bhi bharatiya ka ho, chahe vah Bharat mein rehta hai, chahe non-resident Indian ho (It's possible the data included figures of deposits with Swiss bank branches in India. They could represent deposits in Swiss bank branches anywhere in the world. They could belong to both resident and non-resident Indians)," Goyal said.

Credit Suisse AG is the only Swiss bank that has banking operations in India. It has one branch.

The minister added that there was nothing to suggest that any part of this corpus represented black money.

Goyal said he had received a statement from the SNB which, he claimed, poured cold water on the assumptions made in the media reports. "It is frequently assumed that any assets held by Indian residents in Switzerland are undeclared (so-called black money)," Goyal quoted the SNB as saying in its response to his query.

He suggested the SNB had indicated that the proper way to read and analyse data on cross-border flow of money was to look at the "locational banking statistics (LBS)" that are collected by the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), which serves as a "bank for central banks around the world".

Goyal said BIS data showed that deposits by resident individuals in Swiss bank branches in that country had "actually gone down by 34.5 per cent in the last year compared to the previous year".

He said loans and deposits of Indians other than banks had decreased by 44 per cent in the last quarter of calendar 2017 (October-December).

While the LBS measures international banking activity from a residence perspective, focusing on the location of banking office, and captures around 95 per cent of all cross-border banking activity, SNB data includes non-deposit liabilities, the business of Swiss branches located in India, inter-bank transactions and fiduciary liability.

BIS data show that non-bank loans and deposits - which constitute the individual and corporate deposits and exclude interbank transactions - fell by 34.5 per cent in 2017 to $524 million, compared with $800 million in 2016, Goyal said.

"Further, there has been a significant reduction in Swiss non-bank loans and deposits of Indians by 80.2 per cent between 2013 and 2017," he said, adding that the figure in 2013 was $2.6 billion which came down to $2.3 billion in 2014 and $1.4 billion 2015.

He said India had signed a new treaty with Switzerland, which had lifted the veil of secrecy on money flows into that country.

"Under the new treaty, we won't even have to seek information from the SNB. After January 1, 2018, India will get automatic data on which we can take action. We will automatically get information regarding the data of December 2017 by way of opening balance."

However, Goyal's reply did not satisfy Trinamool Congress members who stormed into the well of the House demanding that black money stashed in Swiss banks be brought back, forcing chairman M. Venkaiah Naidu to adjourn the proceedings for about 90 minutes

Later, talking to reporters in Parliament House complex, Goyal attacked Congress president Rahul Gandhi for maligning the country's image by raising the issue of increase in black money deposits of Indians in Swiss banks based on baseless reports.

"I think Rahul Gandhi should reply to the nation why he is maligning the image of the country on the baseless report," he said.