Large Defaulters Owe Rs.29 Lakh Crore to PSU Banks, Recovery Cases Ongoing in Courts

The Government says NPA is decreasing in Public Sector Banks but Data tells a different story. While the Union Government and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) claim that Non-Performing Assets (NPAs) of Public Sector Banks are at a ten-year low, the latest data shows that large defaulters of PSU banks owe around ₹29 lakh crore.

Large defaulters are borrowers who owe ₹1 crore or more and are facing civil cases filed by banks for non-repayment of loans.

Earlier in February, the Government informed Parliament that the gross NPA ratio of scheduled commercial banks had fallen to a historic low of 2.15% of total loans and advances as of September 2025. However, there is still no clear explanation of how these figures were calculated.

According to publicly available data, 11 PSU banks are currently fighting civil cases in courts across the country to recover about ₹28.93 lakh crore from corporate borrowers. One of the biggest defaulters on the list is Anil Ambani and his companies, with outstanding dues of about ₹48,282 crore. Data on large defaulters up to January 2026 is available with the credit rating agency TransUnion CIBIL. All PSU banks except Indian Bank have published their lists of large defaulters.

Details of NPAs have been made public only once by the RBI. In 2021, the RBI submitted NPA data in a sealed cover to the Supreme Court after a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) was filed by former BJP MP Subramanian Swamy. He had asked the court to issue guidelines for giving large loans to corporate borrowers. The RBI told the court that these accounts belonged to existing customers and banks must follow privacy rules. As a result, the data was never released publicly.

Swamy had also attached a 2015 Credit Suisse report titled “Debt Over Debt” with his PIL. The report claimed that India’s top 10 corporate groups together had NPAs exceeding ₹11 lakh crore. The list included the Anil Ambani Group, Vedanta, Essar Group, Adani Group, Jaypee Group, JSW Group, GMR Group, Lanco, Videocon Group and GVK Group.

Later, the Videocon Group was involved in a bribery case in which ₹350 crore was allegedly paid to Deepak Kochhar, husband of former ICICI Bank CEO Chanda Kochhar. The GVK Group was later taken over by the Adani Group after the CBI registered a case based on a CAG report alleging misuse of public money.

India currently has 12 Public Sector Banks, and most of them regularly publish details of large defaulters. These cases are serious for banks because many of the loans were given without adequate collateral security. However, Indian Bank has not published any such data for the past year.

Among the PSU banks, Union Bank of India has the highest amount of large defaults, with dues of about ₹9.96 lakh crore. Bank officials say this happened after Corporation Bank and Andhra Bank were merged with Union Bank.

State Bank of India (SBI) comes second with ₹5.79 lakh crore, followed by Punjab National Bank (₹2.59 lakh crore), Canara Bank (₹2.49 lakh crore), Bank of Baroda (₹2.21 lakh crore), Bank of Maharashtra (₹1.78 lakh crore), Central Bank of India (₹1.44 lakh crore), UCO Bank (₹1.11 lakh crore), Bank of India (₹96,512 crore), Indian Overseas Bank (₹30,861 crore) and Punjab & Sind Bank (₹27,954 crore).