Wilful defaulters borrowing Rs 25 lakh and above owed more than Rs 15,490 crore to PNB as of May end, up 2 per cent from the preceding month. The data from the state-owned Punjab National Bank covers the big wilful defaulters who are not paying back their loans despite having the capacity to do so. These borrowers of PNB had defaulted on loan repayment of Rs 15,199.57 crore as on April 30 this year.

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For financial year ended March 2018, the bank's balance sheet had closed with big wilful defaults owing Rs 15,171.91 crore. PNB suffered a standalone net loss of Rs 12,282.82 crore in 2017-18, as against a profit of Rs 1,324.80 crore in 2016-17. The major defaulters included Kudos Chemie - Rs 1,301.82 crore; Kingfisher Airlines Rs 597.44 crore; BBF Industries Rs 100.99 crore; ICSA (India) Ltd Rs 134.76 crore; Arvind Remedies Rs 158.16 crore and Indu Projects Ltd Rs 102.83 crore.

Others included Jas Infrastructure and Power Ltd - Rs 410.96 crore; VMC Systems - Rs 296.8 crore; MBS Jewellers - Rs 266.17 crore; Tulsi Extrusion - Rs 175.41 crore. These borrowers took loan from PNB through a consortium arrangement of several banks. The defaulters who took loan solely from PNB were: Winsome Diamonds and Jewellery - Rs 899.70cr; Forever Precious Jewellery & Diamonds - Rs 747.97 crore; Zoom Developers - Rs 410.18 crore; Nafed - Rs 224.24 crore and Mahua Media Pvt Ltd - Rs 104.86 crore.

The Indian banking sector, particularly state-owned lenders, is grappling with mounting non performing assets (NPAs) or bad loans as also a host of scams and frauds. NPAs in the banking sector stood at Rs 8.31 lakh crore as of December 2017. The total bad loan write-off by the public sector banks stood at over Rs 1.20 lakh crore in the last fiscal, with SBI bearing the burnt at Rs 40,196 crore, nearly 25 per cent of the total write-offs during 2017-18. 

This was followed by Canara Bank (Rs 8,310 crore), Punjab National Bank (Rs 7,407 crore) and Bank of Baroda (Rs 4,948 crore). Scam-hit PNB which has suffered a fraud of Rs 14,357 crore allegedly carried out by celebrity jewellery designer Nirav Modi and his associates, witnessed a sharp deterioration in its asset quality with gross loans mounting to 18.38 per cent of gross advances at the end of March 2018, as against 12.53 per cent a year ago. Net NPAs were also soared to 11.24 per cent against 7.81 per cent year ago.

In absolute terms, the gross NPAs of PNB surged to Rs 86,620 crore in the fourth quarter as compared to Rs 55,370 crore in same quarter a year ago. Similarly, the net NPA also rose to Rs 48,684.29 crore from Rs 32,702 crore at the end of March 2017.