The NPA Conundrum

Arguably, the year will be remembered and referenced in days to come for a mixed bag of economic events.

- Saptarshi Roy Bardhan

If it was for the ushering in the GST regime in the country on the one hand, the unmasking of banking frauds that unfolded the NPA mismanagement story in the Indian banking system, should be the other.

While RBI as the controlling authority of the banking sector of the country had picked up the arduous task of purging the system of bad loans since last three years, the spring cleaning of the long neglected kitchen seemed to be falling flat to a great extent as more rodents continued to scamper around.

A look at the trend of Gross NPAs clocked by the Indian banks showed that compared to March 31, 2010 the NPA level jumped by about four times in five years (end 2015) and eight times by end of 2016. In the same scale, it was 9.75 times in March 2017.

While the Gross NPA to Advance stood at 2.51% on end March 2010, it galloped to rise to 9.32% FY 2017. Data from RBI’s financial stability reports shows that in end September 2017, the figure has already touched 10.2%. Hence, once the NPA arising out of PNB, BoB and other banks are factored in, the final count can be anybody’s guess.

Public Sector Banks ( PSBs) , numbered about 26 ( including SBI and its Associate banks, now merged), stockpiled the lion’s share of the bad loans traditionally and it showed up in the Gross NPA to Advance ratio of 2.03 % in 2010, soaring up to about 13% at the end of FY 2017.