RBI to meet bankers tomorrow on NPAs

Reserve Bank Deputy Governor K C Chakrabarty will meet top bankers on Wednesday to discuss the rising non-performing assets(NPAs) in the system.

The senior most deputy governor would meet the bankers at the RBI headquarters on Wednesday afternoon, an RBI official said in Mumbai on Tuesday.

Governor D Subbarao had announced that the regulator would be meeting bank chiefs to take stock of the rising NPAs which had hit banks' bottom lines in the third quarter.

The RBI has since maintained that the situation was manageable and it was not a systemic issue.

The rising NPAs have been blamed on elevated interest rates (RBI increased its key rates a record 13 times for 19 months till October 2011), slackening pace of economic growth and the migration to system-based generation of NPAs at many state-owned lenders.

As a result, most of state-run banks have been forced to almost double their provisioning with sectors like aviation (Rs 90,000 crore in debt, a large part of which is bad assets - Air India over Rs 67,000 crore, Kingfisher over Rs 10,000 crore in NPAs), textiles and power which have a debt of Rs 1 trillion each, telecom has nearly Rs 17,000 crore of bad loan from GTL, and heavy debt running into another trillion (RCom alone has over Rs 33,000 crore in debt).