The government’s proposal to sell stake in IDBI Bank may happen sooner than expected.

“The government is working on the IDBI Bank stake sale. The target date is much closer than six months,” Banks Board Bureau (BBB) Chairman Vinod Rai said on Friday.

He, however, said the issue is not being looked at by the BBB.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in Union Budget 2016-17 had said the government would consider reducing its stake n IDBI Bank to less than 50 per cent.

Meanwhile, Rai, who held a day-long meeting with the heads of public sector banks, said mergers and consolidation is a secondary issue and no such proposal has come.

“Just now it is the question of trying to resolve the assets and trying to ensure any vacancies which exist get filled up; so we are working towards that. Consolidation and all that is being discussed. It is work-in-progress,” he said.

He also stressed that the bad loan situation of banks is not alarming and each lender has a strategy to resolve the problem of non-performing assets.

“All of them are suffering from stressed assets. They are across infrastructure sectors. But each bank has a strategy to resolve, which would be different from every other bank. That is what we discussed,” he said.

The gross NPAs of State-run lenders rose to 7.3 per cent on December 2015 from 5.43 per cent in March 2015.

On the issue of whether State-run lenders would require more than the budgeted ₹25,000 crore for re-capitalisation this fiscal, Rai said a decision would be taken after their fourth quarter results.

“The results are being declared now; audit is going on. Only after that the government will take a view on how much is to be infused,” he said.

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