Banks awash with deposits, in a bind

“Demonetisation has made banks flush with funds, and they will lend it to productive sectors." - Power Minister Piyush Goyal, November 26, 2016. It won't be quite as easy as Goyal said. Rising non-performing assets (NPAs) and sluggish economic growth sparked a 60 per cent decline in corporate borrowing over the last six years, according to an IndiaSpend analysis of Reserve Bank of India (RBI) data, inhibiting the anticipated lending bonanza to companies from banks after demonetisation.

Now, after the government scrapped 86 per cent of India's bank notes, by value, there are growing indicators of a further slowing. Automobile companies are witnessing the sharpest fall in deliveries to dealers in 16 years, the Times of India reported; home sales have hit a six-year low, NDTV Profit reported; and bank credit to infrastructure companies declined steadily over the first eight months of 2016-17 and contracted 6.7 per cent in November, the Indian Express reported, quoting RBI data released on January 10, 2017.

So, the Rs 12.44 lakh crore ($182 billion) that has now returned to the banking system may be difficult to lend to the corporate sector. "Deposits can be deployed only if interest rates are cut. Without reducing interest rates, demand won't rise," said Nilanjan Ghosh, economist of the Observer Research Foundation, a think tank. "The assumption is that demonetisation has led to higher deposits, resulting in larger cash reserves, allowing banks to advance loans and earn interest. This, in turn, will impact profits, strengthening the core capital of banks."

"Demonetisation, apparently, has led to a swelling number of bank deposits, but even if there is a significant thrust from the government, it may take banks between nine to 12 months to deploy such funds profitably," said R Maheshwaran, a former general manager with a public sector bank. Merely reducing key rates won't help, since banks will have to meet capital requirements before they start lending, said Vipin Malik, former director, central board of the RBI.

"Increasing deposits may help in the long term, but the banks will breach the capital trigger of March 2017 unless the government infuses capital," said Malik. "The banks have breached sectoral limit of lending in terms of capital adequacy."Stating that a lot of unaccounted money has been lodged in banks, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley recently asserted that these deposits would increase the lending capacity of banks.

While rising NPAs is one reason for the decline in corporate borrowings, declining demand due to an economic slowdown and stagnation of existing industrial capacity has also contributed to the lending downturn. "Risks to the banking sector remained elevated due to continuous deterioration in asset quality, low profitability and liquidity," the RBI warned in a December 2016 report.

The NPAs of public- and private-sector banks were around Rs 6 lakh crore as of March 2016, Jaitley told the Lok Sabha."If NPAs rise, capital gets eroded, forcing banks to lend less," said Anil Prabhu, general secretary of the Punjab National Bank Employees Union. "A large chunk of NPAs of banks are from large enterprises. There is higher risk involved," Ghosh said. "So, bankers might have taken a conscious decision to lend less to them."

Bid to infuse capital will help banks

To help banks meet a minimum cushion of liquidity, the finance ministry in August 2015 said that PSBs would need Rs 180,000 crore ($26.8 billion) capital over the next four years. The government has proposed the Indradhanush plan to infuse Rs 70,000 crore ($10.4 billion) in PSBs over the next four years, although banks will have to raise additional funds from the market.

"State banks are dependent on the government for capital but capital injection by the government is not sufficient to address capital needs," said Vishwas Utagi, secretary of the All India Bank Employees Association (AIBEA). "With markets on the decline, the prospect of raising capital from the market looks weak." (IndiaSpend.org)

By Prathamesh Mulye