Excelsior Correspondent
Srinagar, July 31: Governor N.N. Vohra reviewed the functioning of J&K Bank in a meeting held today at the Civil Secretariat.
The meeting was attended by B.B. Vyas, Advisor to Governor, S.V.R. Subrahmanyam , Chief Secretary, Parvez Ahmed, Chairman, J&K Bank and Navin K. Choudhary, Principal Secretary Finance Department.
Parvez Ahmed, Chairman J&K Bank, made a detailed presentation regarding the performance of the Bank in the last four years and apprised Governor about the reasons for the losses incurred in the previous Financial Year and accumulation of Non Performing Assets (NPA) to the tune of Rs.6000 crore.
He informed that the Bank is expecting to recover an amount of Rs.4000 crore from the NPA accounts and all efforts are being made to maximize the recovery and early cleaning up of the balance sheet. He also explained the reasons of NPA, bulk of which has been in the Corporate Sector.
Chairman informed that adequate provisioning has been made to cover the NPA Accounts as well as the accounts which were restructured and have faced stress due to restructuring of loans following the 2014 floods and disturbances of 2016.
Governor stressed that the credit appraisal system in the bank needs to be strengthened and adequate checks and balances must be enforced at all levels to avoid similar situations in future. While appreciating that the bank has returned to profit in Financial Year 2018-19, Governor exhorted upon the Board and Management to review the policies, strategies, IT framework and the business procedures from top to bottom to make the Bank competitive vis-à-vis the best in the arena.
Governor expressed some anxiety over the Cost to Income Ratio and advised Chairman to bring the same down within an envisaged time frame and expand bank branches to particularly provide banking facilities in the far flung areas of the State. He also advised constant monitoring of the branch-wise business and the profit per employee.
He advised that the recruitment procedures should be transparent and, preferably, recruitments made by an independent agency. Chairman was asked to review the earlier decision to abandon recruiting Probationary Officers in the Bank who, would grow to occupy leadership positions in the bank.
Governor advised well considered steps to raise the credit deposit ratio and for the J&K Bank to take lead in providing credit to primary sector, SMEs and place higher focus on small trade and businesses within the State.
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