The government will coordinate with banks to improve the health of the state run banks, said finance minister Arun Jaitley today after the quarterly review of public sector banks.
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The finance ministry source said the meeting would also review the steps taken by PSBs to prevent future misdemeanours like the Rs.6,100 crore Bank of Baroda black money remittance case.
The Gross NPAs of PSU banks rose to 6.03 per cent at the end of June, as against 5.20 per cent in March this year.
Jaitley also mentioned huge NPAs of some banks were partly due to willful defaulters saying “there is anyway a common thread among all of them”.
The Finance Ministry will work on coordinated action to deal with stress in public sector banks.
“Problems of the steel sector and steps taken by the government in this area were discussed”.
He asked the bankers to get rid of their past scars of Non Performing Assets (NPAs) and clean-up their balance sheet at the earliest.
On the issue of bad asset quality of banks, he said he was not really concerned with the situation at present since it is a transient problem and will improve with time, as credit offtake improves.
On education loan, progress made by banks in activating the Vidya Lakshmi Portal, which is a first-of-its-kind portal providing a single window facility for students to access information and apply for educational loans provided by banks as well as Government scholarships were reviewed. Jaitley said insurance and welfare schemes including the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojna by and large have received an overwhelming response.
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The meeting will be attended by, among others, the Minister of State for Finance, the Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the Secretary, Department of Financial Services, the Secretary/ senior officials of the Ministries of New & Renewable Energy (MNRE), Ministry of Small & Medium Enterprises (MSME), Food Processing, Textiles and Rural Development.
