India can take more steps to be competitive in the global market, such as enforcing contracts, World Bank President David Malpass said. “There can be more progress in land permits and in enforcement of contracts,” Malpass said at a press conference in New Delhi on Saturday, Bloomberg News reported. “Other countries in Asia have done pretty well.” India jumped 14 places to 63rd in the World Bank’s annual rankings for ease of doing business released Thursday, helped by a new insolvency law.

ICICI Bank Ltd., India’s second-largest private lender, posted a lower than expected profit due to a one-time income tax adjustment, Bloomberg News reported. Net income fell 28% to 6.55 billion rupees ($98 million) for the three months ended Sept. 30 from 9.1 billion rupees a year earlier, the lender said Saturday. The profit compared with analysts expectation of 13.8 billion rupees on average, according to estimates compiled by Bloomberg.

India’s top court ordered several telecom carriers, including Bharti Airtel Ltd., Vodafone Idea Ltd. and many defunct ones, to pay the government as much as 920 billion rupees ($13 billion) in past dues, dealing a blow to the businesses already struggling to make profits and pare debt, Bloomberg News reported. The Supreme Court, in a ruling read out by a two-judge bench headed by Justice Arun Mishra, said it will decide on the timeline for payments. Thursday’s decision possibly puts an end to the two-decades-old legal dispute over airwaves fees owed to the government.

Suspend your disbelief, and like the protagonist of the popular Bollywood movie “3 idiots,” keep muttering: “All is well, all is well.” If it isn’t yet, it will be. That seems to be the whole approach behind the ongoing efforts to restructure an Indian financier, Dewan Housing Finance Corp., which some months back started defaulting on its outstanding debt of $12 billion, a Bloomberg View reported. Trouble is, the rescue is entirely fictional. The only reason it’s even being attempted is to delay — as long as possible —  the collapse of this large shadow lender.

Indian companies have defaulted on a record 76 billion rupees ($1.1 billion) of local-currency and international bonds so far this year after the shadow bank crisis triggered a credit squeeze, and it doesn’t look like the worst is over, Bloomberg News reported. Those firms that delayed or missed debt payments in 2019 still have the equivalent of $17 billion of notes and loans outstanding including the defaulted securities, according to company documents, exchange filings and data compiled by Bloomberg. In the latest instance, tycoon Anil Ambani’s Reliance Capital Ltd.

India will spend about 410 billion rupees ($6 billion) on two unprofitable state-run telecommunication companies in a bid to help the firms take on competition, Bloomberg News reported. The government also approved a plan to combine Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd., which provides services in Mumbai and New Delhi, with Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd., that services the rest of the nation, Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said at a briefing in New Delhi on Wednesday. MTNL has reported losses in nine of the past 10 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

About 25 group companies to which Dewan Housing Finance Corp. Ltd (DHFL) had lent a total of ₹14,000 crore had an average profit of about ₹1 lakh, a forensic audit of the company has found, raising suspicion that the mortgage lender may have diverted funds, Mint reported. Out of the around ₹27,000 crore worth of loans raised by DHFL from banks for on-lending to home buyers, around ₹10,050 crore was invested in mutual funds, the findings of the audit revealed.

A health check on India’s shadow banks shows the crisis in the industry is far from over. Indicators from liquidity to share performance show weakness, according to data compiled by Bloomberg as of Sept. 30, Bloomberg News reported. In recent weeks, another financier defaulted, it got harder for investors to cut losses in the sector’s debt and a mortgage lender altered financing plans due to waning appetite for shadow bank bonds.

More than two years back, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) named Essar Steel as one of 12 companies whose non-performing assets (NPA) were clogging up the banking system, The Print reported. In its 13 June 2017 order, the central bank had also asked the lenders to initiate proceedings against these companies under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) at the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT). Accordingly, the NCLT bench in Ahmedabad started hearing insolvency proceedings against Essar Steel the same month.

Snatch-and-grab is the new hallmark of Indian finance. As a banker friend in Mumbai put it to me only half-jokingly, a unit of "grabbed" cash collateral in hand is worth more than two units of hypothetical receivables, a Bloomberg View reported. Yet this is no laughing matter. Not only is opportunistic behavior going to worsen India’s $200 billion-plus bad loan crisis, but now that everyone from the government’s sleuths to the courts are joining the melee, the ensuing chaos will limit the recovery for lenders and threaten depositors.