Not ripe yet

The current global crisis, and its impact on private sector Indian banks, has made State Bank of India chief OP Bhatt a happy man. So, at the bank’s AGM, he decided to have some fun at rival ICICI Bank’s expense and said it was an ‘unfit’ candidate for acquisition. He said, tongue firmly in cheek, that his bank had no plans to acquire ICICI Bank as it was not advisable to take over the country’s largest private sector bank in its present state. SBI, it is well known, has benefitted from the shift in depositors from private sector banks to public sector ones and from the likely larger rise in NPAs in private banks who lent aggressively in the retail market.