 "graph")
Before Ides of March became associated with Julius Caesar’s assassination, Romans regarded the date as a deadline to settle debt. Most countries now end their financial years in March and banks square off their balance sheets then. An analysis shows that March is when India’s 67 power distribution companies, or discoms, (mostly state-owned) rush to clear most of their debt.
This March, discoms cleared Rs 34,150 crore worth of debt owed to power-generating companies. The average debt cleared in the previous 11 months of 2020-21 was Rs 12,821 crore.
A Business Standard analysis shows that the debt settled in March is almost two to four times higher than the average debt settled every month in the rest of the financial
