Indian banks are facing the prospects of their bad loans rising by Rs 40,000 crore mark as 8 consortium accounts of Axis Bank have been classified as NPA by the RBI. The central bank had recently announced that it had directed Axis Bank to carry out reclassification of its assets and provisioning as on March 2017, based on the annual Risk-based Supervision exercise for 2016-17. This has resulted in the bank reclassifying 9 standard accounts as NPAs and of these 8 are part of consortium lending. Axis Bank, however, claimed that these 9 accounts were classified as standard assets across most of the other consortium banks with only around 6% of their outstanding classified as NPA. The total outstanding of these accounts as at the end of June 2017 were about Rs 42,000 crore.
