A few more members of the consortium of banks that had agreed to recast Rs 2,460 crore worth of debt of Jindal India Thermal Power (JITPL), which owns a 1,800 MW coal-based thermal power plant in Angul, Odisha, have completed the restructuring, sources told FE.

“While some of the larger lenders to JITPL, like State Bank of India and Punjab National Bank, had completed the 5/25 refinancing of its debt in January and February, we did it only recently,” a senior banker with Dena Bank said, adding that that the rest of the banks that aren’t through with the restructuring have indicated that they would complete it before March 31.

FE was the first to report last month that a consortium of 18 banks have agreed to refinance JITPL’s debt under the 5/25 scheme and that while nine of

them had completed it, the others were in the process of doing so.

Introduced by the Reserve Bank of India in 2014, the Flexible Structuring of Long Term Project Loans to Infrastructure and Core Industries, popularly known as the 5/25 scheme, allows banks to extend the tenor of a loan to infrastructure projects, thereby reducing the repayment burden on companies.

The plan was introduced as RBI felt that a fear of asset liability mismatch is stopping banks from providing long tenor financing to infrastructure projects, thereby putting pressure on their cash flows and in some cases, making them unviable.

The BC Jindal Group, of which JITPL is a part, has been struggling in recent years as many of its businesses have struggled to generate the necessary cash flow required to service its high debt.

For instance, as of FY15, JITPL’s holding company – Jindal India Powertech – had pledged 51% of its stake in the former for a term loan, over R5,086 crore of which is due over the next 10 years. Even Jindal Photo, which is JITPL’s ultimate holding company, has been reporting losses at a consolidated level for the last three years.

In fact, in FY15, insufficient cash flows had forced it to delay the repayment of over R100 crore worth of principal and several hundred crore worth of interest, in some cases by well over a year.