Bid to clear India's corporate bad debt hits hurdles

Mumbai

A TOOL provided by India's central bank to help lenders tackle bad debts is instead helping to camouflage the scale of the problem, evidence of how the country's banks will struggle to meet an ambitious clean-up target in 16 months' time.

India's banks are grappling with more than US$110 billion of corporate stressed debt, a burden that is holding back fresh loans and hampering a speedier economic recovery.

Hoping to press banks to acknowledge the size of bad debts and tackle them, the Reserve Bank of India last week set a March 2017 goal, although it did not specify exactly what would have to be achieved by that date.

Emphasising the challenge ahead for governor Raghuram Rajan is the growing debate around the most high profile tool the RBI has offered lenders to date - strategic debt restructuring (SDR), a p…