India, Jan. 1 -- Gross non-performing assets (NPAs) as a share of total advances of all scheduled commercial banks (SCBs) stood at 2.2% of all advances in September 2025, according to the latest Financial Stability Report (FSR) released by the RBI on December 31. Anybody reading this number on a one-off basis would need to be reminded that this number was 11.2% in 2017-18. The cleaning of bank balance sheets is one of the most important detox exercises for the Indian economy in the last decade. While the number officially reached a peak in 2017-18, there is good reason to believe that the stress had built up from much earlier and came to the fore after the then RBI leadership forced an asset quality review on the banks.

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