Banks must recover each penny lent to borrowers: Arun Jaitley

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has said that the banks must recover each penny they have lent to borrowers. Talking to a TV channel yesterday, he said, it's not only a legal but a moral obligation that every banking institution in India has to recover the last pie. 

Mr Jaitley said, the government cannot accept a situation where 15 or 20 people are sitting on so much money of the banks that the ability of the banks to lend to thousands of others get severely impacted.  He said,



the government will support every efforts by the banks to recover bad debts and the lenders to protect their interest as it involves public money. 

Talking about bad loans in the banking system, Mr Jaitley said there are two kinds of Non Performing Assets (NPAs), one is because of economic slowdown, while the other emanates from questionable practices. Gross NPAs ratio of the public sector banks increased from 5.43 per cent in March 2015 to 7.30 per cent in December 2015.