Deepak Parekh, chairman, Housing Development Finance Corporation (HDFC) has indicated a possible merger of HDFC-HDFC Bank in near future. However, he did not elaborate his statement on such a proposed move, while responding to a question asked by industrialist Anand Piramal at an event held at Indian Merchants Chamber in Mumbai on Tuesday.
Parekh also said that inflation in India might settle down at 6-7% levels by March 2009. He expects the inflation to fall below the 10%-mark within a month and the country?s growth rate to remain at 7-7.5% in the current fiscal.
?We will wait-and-watch for some time before taking a final call on the interest rates. The deposit rates in the system have to come down first before cutting the lending rates. And, I do not rule out the possibility of more monetary measures being implemented by the Reserve Bank of India,?Parekh added.
He said HDFC witnessed a decline in bulk disbursements of loans in the month of October. The average size of housing loan that got disbursed by HDFC in the initial six months of the current fiscal was only around Rs 14 lakh.
Simultaneously, Parekh also said housing loan disbursements would gain momentum only after the country?s real estate sector witnesses the expected correction in prices. ?Many builders in Chennai have already lowered real estate prices by around 25%. A possibility of something like this happening in other cities including Mumbai cannot be ruled out,? he said.
Parekh indicated that a crisis of confidence prevails in the Indian banking sector currently, as the banks do not trust one another in the current scenario. ?However, I do not foresee that any Indian bank would collapse. If such a situation arises, I am confident that the regulator would allow a takeover in the Indian banking space to avert the crises.?