PSBs wrote off ₹5.82 lakh crore in bad loans over the last five years; ₹91,260 crore in 2024–25.
Write-offs follow RBI guidelines after full provisioning; they do not waive borrower liabilities, and recovery actions continue.
Over ₹21.68 lakh crore disbursed under PMMY in the last five years
Public sector banks (PSBs) have written off bad loans of about ₹5.82 lakh crore in the last five financial years, Parliament was informed on Tuesday.
During 2024-25, the loan write-off of PSBs was at ₹91,260 crore, compared to ₹1.15 lakh crore in the previous fiscal, Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary said in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha.
The write-off was highest at ₹1.33 lakh crore during 2020-21, declining to ₹1.16 lakh crore in the following year and to ₹1.27 lakh crore in 2022-23.
In contrast to write-offs, PSBs have recovered around ₹1.65 lakh crore over the last five years.
Recovery is around 28% of the total write-off in the previous five financial years.
Banks write off NPAs, including those in respect of which full provisioning has been made on completion of four years, as per the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) guidelines and policy approved by banks' Boards, Chaudhary said.
"Such write-off does not result in waiver of liabilities of borrowers and therefore, it does not benefit the borrower. The borrowers continue to be liable for repayment, and banks continue to pursue recovery actions initiated in these accounts," he said.
Further, he said, recovery in written-off loans is an ongoing process and banks continue pursuing their recovery actions initiated against borrowers under the various recovery mechanism available to them, such as filing of a suit in Civil Courts or in Debts Recovery Tribunals, and filing of cases in the National Company Law Tribunal under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, etc.
Replying to another question, Chaudhary said that more than ₹21.68 lakh crore has been disbursed under Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana (PMMY) across the country over the last five years.
In response to another question, Chaudhary said, according to provisional data provided by the RBI for the financial year 2024-25, Scheduled Commercial Banks have recovered a total of ₹32,466 crore through actions initiated in 2,15,709 cases under the SARFAESI Act.
