Govt likely to lower number of public sector banks to 15

RBI has already started recognising bad assets, provision them and is taking some of them via bankruptcy and insolvency process

India will have 10-15 public sector banks with government as the majority stakeholder, from 21 now, as part of its plan to consolidate lenders, finance ministry’s principal economic advisor Sanjeev Sanyal said on Friday. 

He said cleaning up of the bad loan problems was a priority and after that the PSU banks could be consolidated.

“There are around 21-22 PSU banks. The numbers will be reduced in terms of consolidation, but somewhere to the 10-15 range. We are not going to take it too far down...We need to consolidate some of these large number of banks, but be clear that we are