MUMBAI – State Bank of India has spent a decade cleaning large bad loans from its balance sheet, but the recovery numbers show how much of that money proved difficult to reclaim.
The bank wrote off ₹1,51,857 crore in loans involving borrowers with outstanding dues above ₹100 crore between FY2016-17 and FY2025-26, according to RTI data. It recovered ₹20,838 crore, or roughly 14%, against that pool.
The RTI application was filed by Vivek Velankar, a Pune-based RTI activist and president of Sajag Nagrik Manch. The SBI response was issued to him, according to Moneylife, which reported the figures.
A technical write-off does not cancel a borrower’s liability. Under RBI rules, an NPA can be removed from the bank’s active books for accounting purposes while recovery rights remain intact. Provisions already recognised against the asset also matter because a subsequent recovery can reverse part of the earlier loss recognised by the bank. The accounting treatment is therefore neither a loan waiver nor a meaningless bookkeeping exercise.
The decade’s annual figures show how sharply the recovery problem varied. In FY2019-20, SBI wrote off ₹46,348 crore in loans involving borrowers above the ₹100 crore threshold and recovered ₹4,548 crore, roughly 10%. In FY2018-19, it wrote off ₹27,225 crore and recovered ₹1,811 crore.
The picture changed in the latest two years: SBI recovered ₹6,254 crore against ₹7,632 crore written off in FY2024-25, followed by ₹2,677 crore recovered against ₹2,690 crore written off in FY2025-26. The recent improvement matters, but it does not erase the much larger recovery gap built up earlier in the decade.
There is another large number in the RTI response, but it belongs to a different process. Between FY2017-18 and FY2025-26, SBI took 309 loan accounts to the National Company Law Tribunal and similar resolution forums, with claims totalling ₹1,49,895 crore. Resolution plans yielded ₹49,727 crore, leaving a reported difference of ₹1,00,168 crore.
That difference is a resolution haircut, not a technical write-off. The two figures should not be combined into one giant loss number. They describe different stages and mechanisms of dealing with stressed loans.
The RTI response also raises a separate question about transparency. SBI refused to provide the names of the borrowers in the latest response, citing Sections 8(1)(d), 8(1)(e) and 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act. Moneylife reported that SBI had provided such information to Velankar in 2020, making the change in its position noteworthy.
SBI’s balance sheet is considerably healthier today. Its gross and net NPA ratios have fallen sharply, while the bank continues to recover money from accounts that were written off earlier. The clean-up has worked in accounting and asset-quality terms.
But balance-sheet clean-up is not the same as capital recovery. When a large corporate loan deteriorates into an NPA, SBI has already moved from earning interest on productive capital to trying to salvage money from a distressed asset. Provisions recognise that deterioration before the eventual write-off. The final recovery tells the bank how much value it actually managed to reclaim.
That makes the quality of the original lending decision more important than the eventual accounting entry. Underwriting, collateral, projected cash flows, borrower monitoring and early intervention determine whether a large loan remains a productive asset or eventually becomes something the bank spends years trying to recover.
The public dimension is also real, but it needs to be stated correctly. SBI is a public-sector bank, so weak recoveries can reduce profits, affect dividends and influence the value of the government’s holding. They do not automatically turn every unrecovered rupee into a direct taxpayer loss. SBI has cleaned up a large part of its bad-loan problem. The harder part is the history behind that clean-up: ₹1.51 lakh crore in large-borrower loans entered the technical or prudential write-off process over a decade, while only a fraction of that amount has returned.
The write-off may close an account on one part of the balance sheet. It does not close the question of how a loan of that size became difficult to recover in the first place.
