AMN /
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has asserted that the government was giving top priority to addressing the issue of bad loans while acknowledging that the problem of non-performing assets was “adversely impacting” the Indian banking system.
Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Jaitley termed the resolution of the Non-Performing Assets (NPAs) as the “one very big challenge” going forward and the government’s “top priority” at the moment.
He said the magnitude of the NPAs problem was that essentially it was about 20 to 30 big accounts.
However, Jaitley said there was one constraint the government was facing. He said, it’s not a constraint on the leadership quality in the bank, but it’s a constraint on the environment in which the bank bureaucracy functions.
Jaitley emphasised that one of the fundamental flaws in the anti-corruption law has been that erroneous decision-
making, which may be taking hair cuts in order to settle, gets identified as an act of corruption.
The parliamentary committee has unanimously recommended that this be corrected, he said, adding this is at the final stage now.