Winning Bizness Desk
Mumbai. Banks have written off a loan of Rs 11.17 lakh crore from their books in a period of six years till the last financial year 2021-22. This information was given to the Parliament on Tuesday. At the same time, the Finance Ministry has informed that since 2014, the government has raised more than Rs 4.04 lakh crore from disinvestment and strategic sale of Public Sector Undertakings (CPSEs). In a written reply to a question, Minister of State for Finance Bhagwat Karad said that non-performing assets (NPAs), including fully provisioned loans on completion of four years, have been removed from the books of banks by writing them off.
Writing-off NPAs is a routine exercise
Bhagwat Karad said that banks write-off NPAs is a routine exercise to clean their balance sheets, avail tax benefits and optimize capital utilization. He said that the work of writing off bad loans is done by the banks as per the guidelines of the Reserve Bank and the policy approved by their board. He said, as per the Reserve Bank data, Public Sector Banks (PSBs) and Scheduled Commercial Banks (SCBs) wrote off a total amount of Rs 8,16,421 crore and Rs 11,17,883 crore respectively during the last six financial years .
Raised more than Rs 4.04 lakh crore from disinvestment
At the same time, the Finance Ministry has informed that the government has raised more than Rs 4.04 lakh crore from disinvestment and strategic sale of public sector enterprises (CPSEs) since 2014. Out of this, the maximum amount of Rs 1.07 lakh crore has been raised through offer for sale (OFS) in 59 cases. After this, a total of Rs 98,949 crore has been raised through stake sale in 10 installments through Exchange Traded Fund (ETF). In the last eight years, the exchequer got Rs 69,412 crore from the strategic sale of 10 companies, including Air India. Whereas in 45 cases Rs 45,104 crore was received from share buyback. From the year 2014-15, 17 CPSEs got listed from which Rs 50,386 crore was received. Of this, the government got Rs 20,516 crore from the initial public offering (IPO) of insurance company LIC alone.
