Banks and Financial Institutions in the country deal in public money; when a debtor does not pay and his surety gets away from his liability, sometimes even under insouciant judicial pronouncements, public interest gets a drubbing. In Syndicate Bank v. Channaveerappa Belari1, a two-Judge Bench of the Apex Court comprising Arun Kumar and R.V. Raveendran, JJ., while rightly reiterating the long settled principle that so long as the account of the principal debtor is a live account in the sense that it is not settled and there is no refusal on the part of the surety to discharge his obligation, the period of limitation for enforcing the liability of the surety does not commence before noncompliance of the demand made on him by the creditor, entered a caveat in the form of an obiter dictum that if the debt had already become time-barred against the principal debtor, there is no question of the creditor demanding payment thereafter from the guarantor. Just ten days before this judgment t ....