NEW DELHI: With ballooning bad debts staring in the face of Indian banks, Vinod Rai, the new Banks Board Bureau chairman, on Friday said that each bank has a strategy to resolve the non-performing assets problem and the situation is not alarming.
“All of them are suffering from stressed assets. They are across infrastructure sectors. But each bank has a strategy to resolve which would be different from every other bank. That is what we discussed,” Rai said after a meeting with heads of PSU banks.
Asked if the PSU banks would need more than Rs 25,000 crore budgeted for the current fiscal, Rai said, it will be decided only after the banks declare their fourth quarter results. “The results are being declared now, audit is going on. Only after that will the government take a view on how much is to be infused,” he added.
“We discussed standard things like HR issues, board vacancies, NPAs. These are the sort of things we discussed,” Arundhati Bhattacharya, State Bank of India chief said. As of December, the SBI’s portfolio quality declined with gross NPAs at 5.10 per cent of gross advances as against 4.90 per cent a year ago.
The bureau was constituted earlier this year to help the government select heads of public sector banks and financial institutions and assist banks in developing strategies with regard to capital-raising and consolidation.
With regard to stake sale in IDBI Bank, Rai said, it could happen in less than six month but this issue is not looked at by BBB.