India’s central bank on Monday said the proportion of commercial lenders’ non-performing assets (NPAs) may fall slightly to 10.3 percent by March, thanks to measures including the creation of a bankruptcy code, Reuters reported. In June, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had said commercial lenders’ ratio for gross bad loans might even increase to 12.2 percent by March 2019, but they had fallen to 10.8 percent by end-September and now look to dip lower still.

Indian power companies spent much of the past decade rushing to build coal-fired power plants in anticipation of surging electricity demand as economic growth took off. Now, many of those projects are mired in deep financial distress and private investment in coal power has ground to a near halt, the Financial Times reported. The sector has been hit by a host of problems: many plants have struggled to secure fuel supplies, and to clinch deals to sell their power to cash-strapped state distribution companies.

Tasked with helping recover unpaid corporate loans, the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) has helped resolve insolvency and bankruptcy proceedings involving more than ₹80,000 crore in 2018, The Hindu reported. The kitty is expected to swell beyond ₹1 lakh crore in 2019 with several big-ticket default cases pending. Plans are afoot to further strengthen the NCLT by increasing the number of judges and benches, and providing adequate infrastructure to fast-track the process, according to Indian government officials.

After sending two pesky central bank governors packing in a little over two years, Indian bureaucrats have turned their attention to unwinding the monetary authority’s autonomy, a Bloomberg View reported. Their first move, unveiled Thursday, is an innocuous – even laudable – infusion of 410 billion rupees ($5.9 billion) into troubled state-run lenders, bumping up this fiscal year’s outlay for bank recapitalization by 63 percent to 1.06 trillion rupees. The fresh capital partially replaces a shortfall in the  2.11 trillion rupee bank recap announced in October last year.

Essar Steel Asia Holding, the holding company of the bankrupt Essar Steel that was controlled by the Ruias, on Monday told the Ahmedabad bench of NCLT that it was "highly unusual" for lenders to not even consider its debt settlement proposal which was higher than its rival offer, BloombergQuint reported. The Essar Steel Asia Holding had proposed to the committee of creditors, led by State Bank of India, to pay an upfront Rs 54,389 crore to retake the management of Essar Steel, but approached the National Company Law Tribunal after not receiving any reply from creditors.

Embattled liquor tycoon Vijay Mallya's legal troubles continue to mount as he is set to face bankruptcy proceedings in the U.K. high court next year, brought by a consortium of Indian banks in their attempt to recoup of unpaid debt worth nearly 1.145 billion pounds, the Times of India reported.

RattanIndia Power Ltd., a electricity generator backed by hedge fund Farallon Capital Management, is close to restructuring about $500 million of stressed loans, Bloomberg News reported. The company, which is building coal-fired power plants to produce 5,400 megawatt of electricity -- enough to light up 7 million rural homes in India -- has offered to pay banks 52 percent of the obligations of its project in Amravati in Maharashtra state. The talks with creditors are on-going and there’s no certainty they will result in a transaction.