The study aims to examine and analyse the extent of corporate disclosure on the Internet of the selected top Public and Private sector banks in Indian context (both Bank wise and Category Disclosure wise). It also compares the internet reporting practices of the Indian Public and Private sector banks. For the purpose of the study, we thoroughly examined the annual reports of the top ten banks (five Public banks and five private banks) based on their market capitalization for the year 2022. An unweighted disclosure checklist consisting of 119 items of information has been used to examine the disclosure level of online reporting. On an overall analysis, it is observed that the extent of Web-based disclosure in Indian Banking Sector is low to moderate in case of both Public and Private Banks. However, information disclosure level for Public Sector Banks is slightly better than that of Private Sector Banks. The average levels i.e., mean disclosure score of ‘Public Bank’ and ‘Private Bank’ are (61.6) and (54.2) respectively. In case of Public sector banks, ‘Financial Information, Marketing Information and Technological Aspect & User Support respectively are the most disclosed categories whereas in case of Private Sector banks, the most disclosed categories are ‘Financial Information, Technological Aspect & User Support, Corporate Governance Information, and Corporate Social Responsibility and Human Resource Information. The variability in the extent of web based disclosure of both ‘Public Banks’ and ‘Private Banks’ is low which is reflected from the Range value. The test of hypothesis confirms that there is a significant difference in the web-based disclosure level of Public and Private sector banks in India. The result indicates that scope exists for improvement in online reporting of banking sector in Indian context.
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Keywords: Internet Reporting, Banking Sector, Corporate Disclosure, Disclosure Index, India.