Banks wrote off Rs 1 lakh cr in 13 years: Chakrabarty

He said over 95% of such write-offs have been observed in the case of big accounts

Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Deputy Governor K C Chakrabarty said banks had written off Rs 1 lakh crore in the past 13 years and criticised the lenders because as much as 95 per cent of these write-offs were for large borrowers.

“During the past 13 years what we see is that the banking system as a whole has written off more than Rs 1 lakh crore in advances,” Chakrabarty, the senior-most of the deputy governors  at RBI, said.

He said over 95 per cent of such write-offs have been observed in the case of big accounts and expressed anguish that public discourse focuses only on the government’s agricultural  debt waiver scheme of 2008.

“We only talk about the debt waiver of the agricultural borrowers, we don't say big players and of this (Rs 1 lakh crore) 95 per cent are all big borrowers and it has been written off,” he said.

The government had announced a waiver of over Rs 60,000 crore in advances to the farm sector as a one-time measure in the Budget of 2008 following stress in the rural sector.

In his over hour-long interaction with the bankers, Chakrabarty used hard data to support his observation and blamed complacency on credit appraisal and credit management for the present situation of high non-performing assets and high incidence of loan recasts.

Chakrabarty, who joined RBI after a long career as a commercial banker, was particularly critical of the system of a “technical write-off” by the lenders, saying he does not understand the system.

In his speech, he also asked the bankers to be economical with restructuring, if not abolish the system in full.