Fitch says $14 billion bank bailout to ease downgrade woes

India unveiled details of a recapitalisation plan, pledging to inject nearly $14 billion into 20 lenders this fiscal year, in a bid to boost lending in the economy and help tackle a record bad debt problem. The lenders, majority-owned by the government, have more than twothirds of India's banking assets. They also account for most of the record $150 billion in bad loans, which have choked credit growth after years of profligate lending.

"All public sector banks will be adequately capitalised and enabled to serve people and support inclusive growth," said India's top banking bureaucrat, Rajeev Kumar. The finance ministry will raise Rs800 billion through recapitalisation bonds, and provide Rs81.4 billion from its budget to recapitalise the banks, Kumar said.

Fitch says pressure on the ratings of India's state-owned banks is set to ease after the government unveiled plans to inject 881 billion rupees ($14 billion) of fresh capital to help the lenders meet looming Basel norms without hurting a nas- cent recovery in credit growth.

"The large recapitalization is credit positive and will stem downward pressure on viability ratings, which have been cut several times over the last three-to-four years," Jobin Jacob, a Mumbai-based associate director at Fitch, said by phone. The company may revise the outlook on Indian banks this year to stable from negative once the government begins infusing the cash, he said.

The biggest chunk of this money -- 106 billion rupees -- will go to IDBI Bank, whose bad-loan ratio was 25 percent, more than double that of the overall industry. State Bank of India, the nation's biggest lender by assets, will get 88 billion rupees in the year through March 31 while Punjab National Bank will take 55 billion rupees, Rajiv Kumar, banking secretary at India's Finance Ministry, said at a briefing on Wednesday.

The amount is part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's pledge to add a record 2.11 trillion rupees of capital into the lenders over two years, funded through a mix of government-issued bonds, budgetary support and cash raised by the banks themselves. Future infusions by the government will depend on reforms by the lenders, Kumar said.

These include setting up separate units to manage stressed assets and steps to sell non-core assets, as well as prudent credit growth and customer responsiveness. The 20 lenders that will receive the money have extended more than two-thirds of outstanding loans in India and account for almost 90 percent of non-performing debt, according to data from Credit Suisse Group AG.

"As expected, the weakest banks got the highest allocation as the government reiterated its support for all public-sector banks," said Karthik Srinivasan, group head of financial sector ratings at ICRA Ltd., the local unit of Moody's Investors Service. "It is credit positive on a broader level as this will help them make significant headway in swiftly cleaning up their balance sheets."

Modi's administration also denied reports that it is considering allowing more foreign investment in India's banking sector. There is no proposal to relax the foreign direct investment limit, Economic Affairs Secretary Subhash Garg said.

The government is hoping that a stronger banking system will help in bolstering loan growth, which had fallen to a 25-year low in 2017, slowing the pace of economic expansion.

Meanwhile, shares of State Bank of India and other big state-run banks fell on Thursday as they stood to receive less money than investors had expected from the government's much-awaited recapitalisation plan. By contrast, smaller state-run lenders such as UCO Bank gained, as analysts said they would receive more funds than expected.

The Union Government had pledged on Wednesday to inject nearly $14 billion combined into all but one state-run lender by March in return for them implementing reforms, in a bid to boost lending and tackle a record bad debt problem. But the government also said lenders must implement a series of reforms to get the funds, including improving due diligence, allowing specialised monitoring for loans above Rs 250 crore ($39.35 million), and limiting the number of lenders that can club together to dole out loans.