A year since signing, inter-creditor pacts yet to take off, concede bankers

It's one of the worst kept secrets in banking, and not many chief executive officers (CEOs) of banks want to go public on it

Can the country’s bad loan mountain ever be cut down to manageable levels? It was in August 2018 that the Sunil Mehta Committee rolled out the idea of inter-creditor agreement (ICA): to get banks to sit around the spit, and clean up their non-performing assets (NPAs). State-run banks signed up on the double, but it took a quarter of the financial year before private banks (reluctantly) signed up. And now, nearly five months after the central bank made the ICA mandatory in its June 7 circular, we have not travelled much further down the road.

ICA’s architect, Sunil Mehta, who is