The top 50 wilful defaulters in India owed banks as much as Rs 92,570 crore as of March 2022, with Gitanjali Gems, set up by now-fugitive businessman Mehul Choksi, having emerged as the biggest such defaulter.

Citing the data from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), minister of state for finance Bhagwat Karad told the Lok Sabha on Monday that Gitanjali Gems defaulted on loans of Rs 7,848 crore. It’s followed by Era Infra Engineering (Rs 5,879 crore), Rei Agro (Rs 4,803 crore), Concast Steel and Power (Rs 4,596 crore), ABG Shipyard (Rs 3,708 crore), Frost International (Rs 3,311 crore), Winsome Diamonds and Jewellery (Rs 2,931 crore), Rotomac Global (Rs 2,893 crore), Coastal Projects (Rs 2,311 crore) and Zoom Developers (Rs 2,147 crore).

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Wilful defaulters are typically those borrowers who have the ability to repay the loans but are unwilling to do so.

Karad said authorities have initiated a raft of measures to “deter defaulters, to take effective action against them and to recover the default amount from them, including recovery from written off loans”. These defaulters don’t get fresh loans and they are not allowed to set up new ventures for five years, according to the RBI rules. Wilful defaulters and companies that have them on their boards are barred from accessing capital markets to raise money. The government has brought in a law to attach assets of fugitive economic offenders who flee India to escape the reach of law — including Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi and Vijay Mallya — even without a conviction.

Separately, in a written reply in the Lok Sabha, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said loans worth Rs 10.1 trillion have been written off by banks in the last five financial years. Public-sector banks have recovered Rs 4.8 trillion, including Rs 1.03 trillion from written-off loans, in the past five years, she said.

Banks typically write off loans to clean their books by making full provisions for them when all possible efforts to recover money from the defaulters don’t yield results or there is no further scope for recovery. However, the liability of repayment isn’t waived for the defaulters, who are still required to pay back.

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Among state-run banks, largest lender State Bank of India (SBI) wrote off Rs 2 trillion in the last five years, followed by Punjab National Bank (PNB) Rs 67,214 crore and IDBI Bank Rs 45,650 crore, Karad said in a written reply, citing the RBI data. Write-offs have helped banks reduce their non-performing asset (NPA) levels in their books. The gross NPA ratio of banks dropped to a six-year low of 5.9% in March 2022 and the net NPA ratio fell to 1.7%.