Mumbai, May 17

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will keep reviewing the asset quality at commercial lenders this financial year, Deputy Governor R Gandhi said today, as part of ‘a continuous process’ intended to avoid an increase of distressed debt in the sector.

In late 2015, the RBI announced a more formal and comprehensive process of reviewing asset quality at lenders for the financial year that ended in March 2016.

Gandhi said reviewing asset quality would continue this financial year though he did not specify whether it would be under the same process carried out in the last one.

Previously, the RBI used a more fragmented approach to review asset quality at different lenders, with the processes taking place throughout the year.

“It is not that we will not assess the quality of the assets of the banks hereafter,” Gandhi told Reuters in an interview as part of the Reuters Financial Regulation Summit in Mumbai. Reviewing asset quality ‘is a permanent process of supervisory action’.

As per RBI, total of stressed assets held by Indian banks at end of 2015 was around INR eight trillion, constraining their ability to lend at a time when economic growth has slowed below a recent trend of eight per cent.

Given banks’ aversion to take risk following the surge in bad loans, the RBI will not compel them to lend, Gandhi said.