Supporting the idea of a 'national bad bank', Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian has said that the government needs to bail out troubled large corporate borrowers at time, though it may lead to the allegations of corruption and crony capitalism. He also emphasized that at times there is no other way to solve the problem but to write off the mountain of debt.
In order to tackle the mounting Non Performing Assets (NPAs), there have been suggestions from various quarters to set up a 'bad bank'. Subramanian said that it could be a state-owned entity to collect banks' sour assets and try to resolve the stress, which may include writing off the bad loans where there is no scope of revival. He also said that it is a very difficult problem and not unique to India, and added that no political system finds it easy to forgive debt to the private sector, especially to big companies.
CEA further said that political system has to be able to do that and bad bank is one way of trying to do that. He also said that the bad bank will adopt all other options of resolution, including changing the promoters and management as well. He noted that there is a twin balance sheet problem, of stress in the corporate sector as well as the banks due to bad assets, which needs to be resolved so as to facilitate credit supply to the economy.
In the financial year 2015-16, the non-performing assets (NPAs) or bad loans in the banking system, mainly state-owned lenders, more than doubled to Rs 6.95 lakh crore or over 9.3 per cent from close to Rs 2.97 lakh crore in 2012-13. As of December 2016, the total stressed assets, including restructured accounts, amounted to more than 15 per cent of the total advances.
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