new delhi indiscriminate lending in boom years and the reserve bank of indias rbis pressure on banks to recognise sticky assets on their books have resulted in some lenders having to classify over 40 of their loans to large industry as nonperforming assets npas or bad debt putting pressure on their profitsthe finance ministry told parliament on friday that at the end of december there were at least five banks where gross npas from the large industry accounted for over 40 of their exposure to this segment while private sector lender catholic syrian bank was at the top of the heap with close to 50 of its advances to large companies turning into bad debt there were six other banks with gross npas of over 30 of their loans to large industryat least a dozen large companies ranging from steel auto parts and real estate are facing bankruptcy action as they have repeatedly failed to clear their dues another 40 including some consumer goods players have been dragged to the insolvency court by lenders a large number of power companies are staring at an uncertain fate and banks are expected to act against them soonthe action followed a cleanup exercise jointly initiated by the rbi and the government starting with recognition of npas and a followup through the enactment of the insolvency bankruptcy code or ibcthe rbis asset quality review in 2015 pushed up the level of gross npas to large industry from a little under rs 12 lakh crore at the end of march 2015 to rs 53 lakh crore at the end of last december a jump of fourandahalf times in 33 monthsthe data indicates that large industry accounts for close to twothirds of the bad debt although their share of advances is less than 30while a large part of the bad debt was earlier attributed to stalled projects or infrastructure and core sector projects that never took off the recent rbi action indicates that several companies where the promoters were unwilling to repay their debt and sought repeated restructuring have added to the pressure on banksthe numbers also show that the problem is large in public sector banks but not limited to just them for instance at least two foreign banks deutsche bank and standard chartered are among the top 10 with gross npas of over 30 in the large industry category