Mumbai: Arundhati Bhattacharya, who ends four years at the helm of State Bank of India on Friday, said reviving lending in the country was one of the major tasks left unfinished.
India’s state banks, including market leader SBI, the country’s largest, have battled rising bad loans in recent years, a fight that has dampened credit growth and slowed a long-awaited economic revival.
“Even today, credit growth is not where we wanted it to be,” Ms Bhattacharya, the first woman to have led the more than 200-year-old bank, told reporters on her last day in office.
“So that’s an unfinished agenda. And I think the incoming chairman’s already stated it will be his agenda to take that forward.”
Total bank loans in India grew just about 5 per cent in the year to March, the slowest pace in more than six decades.
Latest central bank data showed an annual growth of 6.8 percent for the two weeks to September 15, an uptick but still far slower than the mostly double-digit growth seen this decade.
