Neo-liberal banking reform was launched in the early 1990s to address the low profitability of the public banking system and the large presence of non-performing assets. It set itself the objectives of cleaning out NPAs, recapitalising the banks and modifying banking practices to restore profitability and drastically reduce NPA volumes. This did initially have some effect. However, while the NPA ratio fell between the early 1990s and the mid-2000s, it has risen sharply since then. Moreover, while earlier priority and non-priority loans contributed equally to total NPAs, more recently, large non-priority loans to the corporate sector account for the bulk of NPAs. An analysis of these features reveals that these trends are indicative of the failure of neo-liberal banking reform in India.
