Bill on debt recovery being scrutinised

New Delhi, Jul 20 (DHNS): Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Tuesday informed the Rajya Sabha that there are 8,167 wilful defaulters who owe banks an amount of Rs 76,685 crore. The banks filed 1,724 FIRs in 2015-16 and recovered Rs 3,498 crore from 1,650 such defaulters in the last fiscal.

A bill related to debt recovery, which empowers the banks to take more effective steps in dealing with default situations, is under the scrutiny of a Joint Committee of Parliament, the minister said.

The government is also planning to increase the number of debt recovery tribunals and steps are being taken to fill vacant posts of heads of these tribunals.

Jaitley said many defaults pertain to sectors like steel, infrastructure and power, and the government has worked in the last one and a half years to address problems of these sectors.

He said several other measures have been taken to help banks in such situations and added that the insolvency law has also been recently passed.

Bad loans to jump
Minister of State for Finance Santosh Kumar Gangwar said bad loans of the state-owned banks are likely to rise to 10.1 % by the end of the current fiscal.

In a written reply to the Rajya Sabha, the minister said RBI’s Financial Stability Report had said that “under the baseline scenario, the GNPA (Gross Non-Performing Assets) ratio for public sector banks may go up to 10.1 % by March 2017”.

He attributed the rise in bad loans to a host of factors like domestic growth sluggishness in the recent past, slowdown in recovery in global economy and continuing uncertainty in global markets, leading to lower exports of various products like textiles, engineering goods, leather and gems.

GNPA jumped from 5.43 % (Rs 2.67 lakh crore) in 2014-15 to 9.32 % (Rs 4.76 lakh crore) in 2015-16, Gangwar said in reply to another question.

The minister said there were 701 NPA accounts owing above Rs 100 crore amounting to Rs 1.64 lakh crore in public sector banks as on December 2015.

The Reserve Bank, he added, has also submitted a list of defaulters of above Rs 500 crore to the Supreme Court in a sealed cover.