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1. Introduction
In a fast-growing world, information technology (IT) is proven to be the cornerstone of the recent financial revolution (Bikker and Haaf, 2002; Berger, 2003; Dangolani, 2011; Khanna and Gaur, 2021; Oppong and Pattanayak, 2019; Wang et al., 2022). With the advent of IT post-liberalization in India, the banking industry operates in a highly competitive environment gradually allowing private and foreign banks to strategically exploit the untapped market (Bhattacharyya et al., 1997; Sensarma, 2006; Chen et al., 2018; Goyal et al., 2019; Akhtar et al., 2021b; Akhtar et al., 2022). The entrance of private and foreign players has paved the way for several revolutions in the Indian banking industry posing a direct threat to the domestic banks and compelling their performance appraisal. Since then, the Indian banking industry has gained tremendously and proved crucial in the development of the emerging economy with improvement in the efficiency and productivity of the financial industry (Bhattacharyya and Pal, 2013; Lenka and Sharma, 2017; Akhtar et al., 2021a; Dar et al., 2021; Pradhan et al., 2021; Shah et al., 2022).
In the past decades, the world has witnessed two major financial shocks, i.e. the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2009 followed by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In the wake of these events, the world economy is reeling and an economic recession is looming across the globe including the developed economies of the USA, members of the European Union, etc. (Ball, 2014; Boyson et al., 2014; Reinhart and Rogoff, 2014; Funke et al., 2016; Romer and Romer, 2017; Duprey et al., 2017; Berger and Demirgüç-Kunt, 2021; Chen et al., 2021). On the contrary, previous studies have reported that the Indian banking industry has emerged immune to these shocks, such as the global financial crisis (Eichengreen and Gupta, 2013; Gulati and Kumar, 2016; Kumar et al., 2016; Wanke et al., 2022) and the COVID-19 pandemic (Rakshit and Basistha, 2020; Goswami, 2022). Owing to this, examining the performance and efficiency of commercial banks has gained momentum among researchers, academicians and policymakers in India. This stems from an explosion of literature focusing on the performance of banks in India. Consequently, the investigation of the profitability and efficiency...