We have a good handle on our bad loans, says SBI Chairman

State Bank of India (SBI) Chairman Pratip Chaudhuri has said the bank's level of bad loans is not alarming, even though it is witnessing asset quality stress on account of economic slowdown.

Hit by higher provisioning for bad and doubtful assets, the bank had posted an 18.5 per cent dip in its fourth quarter net profit at Rs 3,299 crore. Its gross non-performing asset (NPA) ratio also jumped to 4.75 per cent from 4.44 per cent a year ago. The NPA figure was at Rs 51,189 crore, up from Rs 39,676 crore.

It had restructured Rs 8,090 crore in January-March, taking the restructured book to Rs 43,100 crore.

"Right now our NPAs are not alarming. We have got a good handle on the NPAs, the accretion of which has somewhat halted," Chaudhuri said.

The country's largest lender has a restructuring pipeline of Rs 2,000 crore at present, he added.

Chaudhuri, however, declined to give a projection of NPAs for the ongoing first quarter, saying he cannot give a forward looking statement.

Accounts in the mid-corporate vertical and farm sector have the highest instance of turning bad for SBI.

Over the past two years, courtesy the gloom on the economic front, SBI has focused a lot on lending to the resilient retail sector in order to drive loan growth.

Chaudhuri clarified that the bank cannot keep away from lending to the corporate sector, as retail loan books alone cannot drive credit growth.

In the past, he has been repeatedly expressing optimism on the NPA front but the bank's reported numbers showed otherwise.

On the recent move by the finance ministry to have an oversight committee of experts to look into the veracity of accounts where restructuring is carried out, Chaudhuri sounded a bit worried, saying there is already diligent thinking by an expert committee which goes in before an account is restructured.

"The CDR is not an arbitrary process... if there has to be another group, I don't have any comments on that. I don't think layers and layers of oversight make it effective," he said.

with inputs from PTI