Why India needs a bad debt agency

Bad debts in state banks are rising but handling them without crimping economic growth will be tricky. Is a bad debt agency the answer?

For an economy that is currently growing at an electric pace, India has a dark worry gnawing at its heart mounting bad debts.

From a macro level all seems fairly good. The country reported GDP growth of 7.3% in 2015, a very rosy level when compared to most of the rest of Asia.

Yet all is not well in the world’s largest democracy. Economists fear its economic growth is overstated, while problem loans are building up, particularly among the state-owned lenders that control about three-quarters of the country’s bank assets.

The Indian Express reported that 29 state-owned Indian banks wrote off INR1.14...

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