New Delhi: The Reserve Bank on Tuesday said Indian banks' gross non-performing assets came down to a multi-decadal low of 1.8 per cent as of March 2026.
The stock of NPAs is expected to inch up to 1.9 per cent in the baseline scenario, the central bank said in its bi-annual Financial Stability Report released on Tuesday.
"The aggregate GNPA ratio of 46 banks may edge up from 1.8 per cent in March 2026 to 1.9 per cent by March 2028 under the baseline scenario," it said in the report, which comes amid headwinds from the West Asia conflict.
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Under worsening conditions, classified as periods of higher challenges, the RBI's stress testing shows that the GNPAs may rise to 3.8 per cent or 4.1 per cent, depending upon the acuteness of the scenario, the report said.
The annual slippage ratio steadily moderated over the last four financial years to 1.2 per cent in 2025-26, driven by lower fresh accretions to impaired assets in private sector banks and public sector banks.
In the case of non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), the asset quality of NBFCs continued to improve across all major economic sectors, the report said.
With the overall NBFCs running into thousands, the RBI did an analysis of 174 major entities, which showed a GNPA ratio of 2.4 per cent in March 2026.
Under the baseline scenario, a system-level stress test of 174 NBFCs revealed that the GNPAs for such a cohort will rise to 2.8 per cent in March 2027 from 2.4 per cent at present.
For urban cooperative banks, the GNPAs declined significantly to 5.2 per cent in March 2026, and the stress testing also showed considerable resilience, with none of the tier-1 and tier-4 UCBs breaching the regulatory capital requirement because of interest rate shocks.
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The FSR, however, said that while banking system resilience is intact, funding is emerging as a key challenge as savers chase higher-yielding avenues to park their money, like equities and mutual funds.
Banks' liability profile is shifting from low-cost current and savings accounts (CASA) to higher-cost term deposits and certificate of deposits, pushing up the marginal cost of funds, the RBI said, adding that banks have resorted to higher-yielding loan avenues like small business lending to protect margins.
Amid the threats posed by Anthropic's Mythos model, the RBI said AI-enabled cyberattacks are the "most important near-term challenge" for banks from a cyber threats perspective.
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