NEW DELHI: Finance minister
Nirmala Sitharaman
on Friday said there has been no leniency in recovering
bad loans
, especially from large defaulters, and
banks
have turned around, reporting record profit of over Rs 3 lakh crore last year, from being a “cesspool of bad loans, vested interests, corruption and mismanagement” during UPA regime.
On the day she completed five years as FM,
Sitharaman
said that between 2014 and 2023, banks recovered more than Rs 10 lakh crore from bad loans.
“Directorate of Enforcement (ED) has investigated around 1,105 bank
fraud cases
, which resulted in the attachment of proceeds of crime amounting to Rs 64,920 crore. As of Dec 2023, assets amounting to Rs 15,183 crore have been restituted to the PSBs,” she said.
“We will continue to take decisive measures to strengthen and stabilise our banking system, ensuring banks support India’s growth path to Viksit Bharat by 2047,” she said in a social media post, while vowing to further step-up financial inclusion.
“Our govt has ‘banked the unbanked’ and ‘funded the unfunded’, in line with the ethos of Antyodaya. We remain committed to further driving financial inclusion and empowering the underprivileged,” Sitharaman said. Over the last few weeks, in a series of social media posts, FM has focused on several aspects of the economy, including insolvency law and fiscal management.
“The ‘Samudra Manthan’ of sorts in the banking sector under PM Modi’s leadership yielded positive results along with expected challenges during the ‘churn’,” she said in her latest post. Sitharaman said after taking office in 2014, govt took a series of steps to recognise the NPA problems, resolve them and recapitalise state-run lenders. “We’ve turned banks from being ‘NPA-laden nightmares’ into ‘Pillars of Jan Kalyan’. From having a ‘Twin Balance Sheet Problem’, we now have a ‘Twin Balance Sheet Advantage’,” she posted, while reeling out numbers.
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