Blanket moratorium extension till December not required: SBI Chairman Rajnish Kumar

MUMBAI: State Bank of India chairman Rajnish Kumar on Friday said that across the board relief on payment of loan dues is not needed beyond August and he expects the Reserve Bank of India to take a more sectoral approach in the coming months.
“The RBI has data from the entire financial system and they will take a call basis that, but if you ask me across the board moratorium is not required anymore,” Kumar said while speaking at a two-day virtual conclave organised by the State Bank of India. “Certain sectors require relief and basis the data that the RBI has access to, I expect a calibrated approach from the regulator.“

SBI had recorded a moratorium book of roughly 20% at the end of May which is set to fall further in the second leg of moratorium.

“If I go by my book and the analysis of that book, the people who have availed moratorium that number is not very significant,” Kumar added. “It is premature to predict that there will be extension of moratorium till December.”

Some media reports had suggested that RBI could look at extending the moratorium till December.

Kumar added that six months moratorium was a mini restructuring and relief for restructuring has to be given to company making losses.

“Any relief has to be looked in three buckets, one is reassessing working capital loans, realigning cash flows through term loan payment relief and deep restructuring for those corporates who are making losses,” he said.

The RBI announced a three-month moratorium in March to help borrowers hit by the economic downturn caused by Covid-19 and the ensuing lockdown. That was subsequently extended by another three months to August. In the first phase, the system-level moratorium covered about half the total loans which dropped to below 30% June onwards.

Kumar also hinted towards a sharp rebound in business recovery from June onwards but sounded a note of caution on account of lower activity in large urban industrial hubs.

“The month of May was better than April and in June we are seeing a smart recovery, the feedback that I get is that the impact on rural areas has been very scare, but the impact of Covid is much severe in large industrial belts like Maharashtra, Gujarat, NCR and Tamil Nadu,” Kumar said. “The recovery has been sharper than we expected but we have to wait for a few months to see if this is sustainable.”

Bumper harvests, record sowing, good monsoons, robust farm income and high demand for goods will likely buttress the initiatives to bring the economy back on the rails. Tractor sales are already witnessing revival in rural pockets while other consumption activity has reached over 80% of pre-Covid levels, experts say.

But, several growth related predictions show the Indian economy will contract in the current fiscal year. Predications range from a degrowth of minus 6% to minus 2%.