A fresh right to information (RTI) reply from State Bank of India (SBI) has exposed the enormous scale of the losses the country's largest lender has absorbed while settling bad loans through the national company law tribunal (NCLT) — even as the Bank continues to stonewall demands to name the big defaulters responsible, despite having disclosed those very names to the same applicant just six years ago.
The reply, signed by the central public information officer (CPIO) and deputy general manager (DGM) Sibasish Biswas of SBI's stressed assets resolution group, is issued to Pune-based RTI activist Vivek Velankar, president of Sajag Nagrik Manch, after his original application was forwarded in appeal.
₹100,168 Crore Written Off in NCLT Settlements Alone
The most striking disclosure concerns SBI's dealings at the NCLT. Over the nine years from FY17-18 to FY25-26, the bank took 309 loan accounts to the NCLT or similar forums, with a combined claim amount of ₹149,895 crore. Of this, SBI could recover only ₹49,727 crore through resolution plans — meaning it had to permanently write off ₹100,168 crore, or roughly 67% of its total claim, as a haircut.
The year-wise data show just how severe some of these settlements were. In FY18-19, SBI's claim in 34 NCLT accounts stood at ₹48,425 crore, but the resolution plans yielded the Bank only ₹26,402 crore — a haircut of ₹22,023 crore in that single year. In FY21-22, against a claim of ₹22,408 crore across 40 accounts, SBI recovered just ₹5,337 crore, absorbing a haircut of ₹17,071 crore — a loss of more than 76% on that year's claims alone.
Even in the most recent year on record, FY25-26, SBI settled 30 accounts worth ₹4,928 crore in claims for a mere ₹1,348 crore, taking a haircut of ₹3,580 crore — a loss of nearly 73%.
Write-offs, Small Recoveries: The ₹1.52 Lakh Crore Gap
Separately, SBI's reply shows that over the 10 financial years from FY16-17 to FY25-26, the Bank technically or prudentially wrote off ₹151,857 crore in loans belonging to large defaulters — those owing more than ₹100 crore each. Of this staggering sum, only ₹20,838 crore, or about 14%, has been recovered so far.
The scale by year is quite revealing. In FY19-20 alone, SBI wrote off ₹46,348 crore against big defaulters — the single largest annual write-off in the 10-year data — and has recovered only ₹4,548 crore of it to date, roughly 10%. In FY18-19, ₹27,225 crore was written off, with just ₹1,811 crore recovered.
There are exceptions that stand out: in FY24-25, the Bank recovered ₹6,254 crore against a write-off of ₹7,632 crore — a comparatively strong 82% recovery rate for that year — and in FY25-26, recovery of ₹2,677 crore nearly matched the ₹2,690 crore written off. These recent improvements, however, do little to offset the overwhelming ₹1.31 lakh crore gap between what was written off and what has actually come Back to the bank over the decade.
By comparison, SBI's reply also discloses that ₹63,103 crore was written off for small borrowers — those owing less than ₹1 crore — over the same 10 years, of which ₹6,815 crore, or about 11%, has been recovered. While this recovery rate is not dramatically higher than that for big defaulters in the raw numbers, small borrowers face swift and public recovery action — including publication of names and addresses and the sale of their homes — while big defaulters, whose unrecovered write-offs run into well over a lakh crore rupee, are shielded from public identification altogether.
Technically speaking, when debts are written off, they are removed from the balance sheet as assets because the bank does not expect to recover payment. This practice is frowned upon by experts, but is routinely done by banks as part of their tax management clean-up process. The beneficiaries are invariably some of our biggest industrialist defaulters.
In contrast, when a bad debt is written down, some of its value remains as an asset because the bank expects to recover it. However, as SBI has shown, most of the time there is no recovery or only a negligible recovery of the amounts written off.
SBI Cites ‘Fiduciary Capacity’ To Withhold Big Defaulter Names — despite Sharing Them in 2020
Mr Velankar had specifically sought the names of borrowers whose dues above ₹100 crore were written off in each financial year since FY16-17, along with the write-off amount for each account. SBI refused, stating that this information is 'personal information of third parties held by the bank in fiduciary capacity and in commercial confidence', and is, therefore, exempt from disclosure under Sections 8(1)(d), 8(1)(e) and 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act.
The Bank gave an identical refusal when Mr Velankar asked for the names of borrowers whose loans were settled through NCLT or similar forums by accepting a haircut, along with the loan amount and haircut agreed for each.
"Bank's Concern for Big Defaulters' Reputation Is Outrageous"
Reacting to the RTI reply, Mr Velankar said the data — big defaulters accounting for 67% haircuts on NCLT claims worth nearly ₹1.5 lakh crore, and just 14% recovery on ₹1.52 lakh crore in write-offs — makes the Bank's continued refusal to name these defaulters all the more indefensible.
He pointed out that these NCLT cases were filed specifically to recover dues from loan defaulters, and it was precisely in that recovery process that the Bank had to forgo thousands of crores — yet SBI appears more concerned with protecting the reputation of these defaulters than with public accountability.
Mr Velankar drew a pointed contrast: banks are quick to publicly name and shame small defaulters in newspapers and move to sell off their homes to recover dues, yet they take a soft, accommodating approach with big borrowers, forgoing huge sums of money — and he held Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Union ministry of finance (MoF) equally responsible for remaining mere spectators to this pattern.
"It is the public's misfortune that no action whatsoever is taken against the directors responsible for the failure to recover these loans after they were written off, for settling loan cases by forgoing thousands of crores of rupees through haircuts, and for having irresponsibly sanctioned such large loans in the first place," he added.
The Bigger Picture
Taken together, SBI's NCLT haircut data and its write-off-versus-recovery figures for large defaulters paint a picture of a bank absorbing enormous, recurring losses on its biggest loan accounts — losses running into well over a lakh crore rupees on each metric — while keeping the identities of those responsible entirely out of public view. With the Bank citing statutory exemptions to withhold names it had itself disclosed in 2020, questions about consistency, transparency, and public accountability at India's largest public sector lender remain pressing and, for now, unanswered.
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