The Prime Minister Narendra Modi will soon hold a meeting with Chief Executives of Public sector banks (PSBs) to review the performance of these banks. 

Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan is also likely to attend this review meeting, which will be held in Delhi, official sources said.

This meeting will be first of its kind as rarely does one get to see the Prime Minister himself chairing a meeting with the chief executives of PSBs.

In his ten years tenure as Prime Minister during the two UPA regimes, Manmohan Singh had not interacted even once with the CEOs of PSBs.

The main issues that would be discussed at the upcoming meeting to be chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi include benefits of a rate cut; non-performing assets (NPAs) and restructured NPAs, recovery, new projects/proposals, financial inclusion and Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana.

PSBs performance in agriculture credit, MSME credit, Housing Loans, education loans and lending to minorities communities will be reviewed, sources said.

Post the Modi-Government assuming charge in end May, there has been only one instance when the PSBs performance were reviewed and this meeting was chaired by the Finance Minister Arun Jaitley.

PSBs are now facing several challenges including surge in non-performing assets (NPAs), governance issues at the Board level, need for more capital to meet Basel -III requirements.

 There are also human resource challenges and as many as six top notch PSBs are headless now.

On the NPA front, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi may look at the approach of the banks in handling their top 30 NPAs and also gross NPAs of over Rs 1 crore, sources said.

Srivats.kr@thehindu.co.in

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