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Banks must not wait for growth to clean their balance sheets. Rather, growth will come once the books are cleaned, said Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Raghuram Rajan on Thursday. He did so while rapping the lenders for abusing the tools offered by the central bank to fight bad debt, to instead hide the extent of bad loans. The recent clean-up operation has the central government’s blessings, he noted. Central bank officials had a series of meeting with the government, including at the “highest,” before coming up with its asset quality review (AQR) that is now causing havoc in banks’ quarterly numbers, throwing up heavy NPAs in the books, revealed the governor. Read Full Article Over Here :  Business Standard News

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is expected to leave its key interest rate steady at 6.75% next week and only make one cut this year as rising inflation ties its hands, according to a Reuters poll. That marks a turn from rapidly cooling domestic consumer price inflation, which allowed the RBI to lower the repo rate four times in 2015. Its last 50-basis-point cut in September took markets by surprise, but the RBI isn’t likely to act as aggressively in 2016, as a renewed uptick in food-costs driven inflation puts the central bank’s medium-term price target at risk. This week’s poll of nearly 40 economists showed only one 25 basis-point rate cut this calendar year, between April and June, unchanged from earlier expectations.  Read Articles