New Delhi: The finance ministry has called a meeting of public sector bank chiefs on April 28 for planning implementation of large projects, a release said here on Sunday.
The meeting has been called in view of the upward trend in the level of non-performing assets (NPAs) and the stressed infrastructure projects of public sector banks, particularly in the last fiscal.
"The objective of this meeting is to understand the problems faced by the project promoters and the banks in retrieving them and to find out a solution to such problems," the finance ministry said in the release.
"Case by case, review of some of the major projects of infrastructure sector such as road, power, steel and shipping would be undertaken by the ministry in the presence of senior officers of the ministries of power, steel, transport, shipping and the senior officers of RBI," it added.
The load on the system can be gauged from the fact that NPAs, or bad loans, of public sector banks rose to 5.33 percent of total advances in September 2014, from 4.72 percent in March 2014.
Stalled projects have been adding to banks' NPAs and the finance ministry's latest economic survey says that, as in December-end, these amounted to Rs.880,000 crores.