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Sunday, April 23, 2017

How bad corporate debts are holding back India's growth

By AFP | Updated: Apr 23, 2017, 09.22 AM IST 


NEW DELHI: The recent arrest of Vijay Mallya highlighted the problem of bad loans in India, but analysts say the tycoon's unpaid debts are just the tip of an iceberg that is already holding back the country's economic growth. 

The multimillionaire owner of a Formula One team and founder of the KingfisherBSE 3.03 % beer brand was arrested on Tuesday in Britain, where he fled a year ago after allegedly defaulting on loans from Indian state banks worth more than $1 billion. 
Banks were finally forced to confront the problem in September 2015 when the central bank set them a deadline of March 2017 to clean up their balance sheets.

From the mid-2000s onwards, Mallya and much of corporate India went on a shopping spree, picking up assets both at home and overseas even as a financial crisis hit the global economy. 

As a result, Indian banks are now saddled with some of the highest levels of bad debts in the emerging markets according to the International Monetary Fund. 

"Banks are so stretched that they're not even lending to healthy companies, holding back growth," Rajeswari Sengupta, . 


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