Second Gyan Sangam of state-run bank heads from Friday

The second retreat of heads of public sector financial institutions - Gyan Sangam - will kick off on Friday at the State Bank Academy in Gurgaon, an official statement said.

The two-day conference, to be opened by union Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha, will be attended by Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Raghuram Rajan, Financial Services Secretary Anjuly Chib Duggal and other senior finance ministry officials, the statement said.

"This retreat has been held to take forward the government's commitment to reforms in the banking and financial sector," it added.

Continuing government efforts to deal with the high levels of non-performing assets (NPAs), or bad debts, of state-run banks, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has allocated Rs.25,000 crore towards their recapitalisation in the next fiscal.

Gross NPAs of public sector banks stood at Rs.3.60 lakh crore at December-end, up from Rs.2.67 lakh crore at the end of March 2015, while gross NPAs of private banks stood at Rs.38,396 crore at December-end, up from Rs.31,576 crore at March-end 2015.

Jaitley plans to provide Rs.25,000 crore capital each in the current and next fiscal years, while Rs.20,000 crore would be provided during 2017-18 and 2018-19.

As per estimates, public sector banks would need additional capital of up to Rs.240,000 crore by 2018 to meet the Basel III capital adequacy norms, put in place to guard against a repeat of the situation following the 2008 US financial crisis.

At the upcoming Gyan Sangam, various decisions taken at last year's edition, held in Pune, will be reviewed, along with the performance of banks and financial institutions.