Policy to tackle NPAs coming very soon: Jaitley

The government will shortly announce measures to deal with the major problem of banks' non-performing assets (NPAs), or bad loans, that it has drawn up in consultation with the RBI, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on Thursday.

"In the next few days, you will hear of some policy decisions taken between the RBI and the government, in order to bring pressure to bear in resolving the NPAs situation," Jaitley said at the CNBC awards event here.

He said that although the NPA amounts are large, the major ones are restricted to a limited number of companies.

"Big NPAs are confined to to 30..40..at best 50 companies," he said.

The magnitude of the problem can be guaged from the NPA figures of state-run banks, which at the end of the current fiscal's second quarter that ended in September, rose to Rs 6.3 lakh crore, as compared to Rs 5.5 lakh crore at the end of the first quarter.

Earlier, this month Jaitley met with Reserve Bank of India Governor Urjit Patel and other senior officials here to discuss the NPAs issue.

The meeting discussed the idea of a Private Asset Management Company (PAMC), as well as a National Asset Management Company (NAMC), to tackle the bad loans issue proposed recently by RBI Deputy Governor Viral Acharya.

As per the plan, the banking sector could be asked to restructure about 50 large stressed assets in sectors like metals, construction, telecom and textiles, by December 31, 2017.

According to sources, the meeting also discussed the concept of a "bad bank" that has been proposed by Chief Economic Advisor (CEA) Arvind Subramanian.

To a query regarding the Universal Basic Income (UBI) scheme advocated by the CEA, Jaitley spoke in praise of the idea and said that an interested state could consider setting up a pilot project.

"Even before he (Subramanian), floated the UBI idea, it had got reflected in the budget of Jammu and Kashmir," Jaitley said.

"I've always considered it a very good idea. Any state government which is willing to take the chance, can consider a pilot project," he added.

The Economic Survey 2016-17, presented in January, advocated a UBI scheme as an alternative poverty reduction mechanism in place of various ongoing social welfare programmes.

The Survey, authored by the Chief Economic Advisor, pitched for a scheme to transfer a reasonable basic income to Indians below the poverty line.

"A UBI that reduces poverty to 0.5 per cent would cost between 4-5 per cent of GDP, assuming that those in the top 25 per cent income bracket do not participate," the Survey said.

Elaborating on the scheme, which has no precedents globally, Subramanian has earlier said that it would entail making an unconditional cash transfer of about Rs 10,000-Rs 15,000 a year to every citizen, and could replace more than 1,000 schemes the government runs for poverty elimination.

--IANS

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