In a major setback for Deccan Chronicle Holdings Ltd (DCHL), public sector bank Canara Bank has filed an insolvency petition against the beleaguered city-based company before the Hyderabad bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) by invoking the provisions of the country's newly ushered in Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), the Economic Times reported.

India's move to strengthen the hand of its central bank will help it push reluctant lenders towards writedowns and errant borrowers into insolvency, bankers said, but the country is far from drawing a line under its $150 billion (£116 billion) of sour debts, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. India's bad loan problem is choking off new credit and dampening economic growth, and the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi knows it needs to act.

State Bank of India, the country’s largest, sees a "positive turnaround" in the nation’s bad loan mess after the government implements a new rule aimed at resolving the problem, chairman of the lender said. "The non-performing asset cycle is different this time," Arundhati Bhattacharya, State Bank’s top executive, said in an interview with Bloomberg News in Yokohama, Japan. "Many assets are good quality and required by the economy -- when growth turns up, they will perform again,” Bloomberg News reported.

India will overtake Germany in 2022 as the world's fourth-largest economy and push Britain out of the top five, based on analysis of growth projections by the International Monetary Fund, Bloomberg News reported. But the challenges the South Asian nation must surmount to get there are many.

Tata Steel has offered to make a one-off payment of £520m into its UK pension scheme, in its latest effort to make a clean break from its large British retirement liabilities, the Financial Times reported. The Indian steelmaker has put the offer to the trustees of the UK scheme — called British Steel Pension Scheme — as part of moves by Tata to try to hive off the retirement fund. The proposed £520m payment into the BSPS is intended to release a guarantee the scheme holds over some of Tata’s Dutch assets.

India’s banks, staggering under the world’s highest bad-asset ratio, may be pushed to wind up or combine with rivals if their capital levels fall below set ratios under new guidelines issued by the country’s central bank, Bloomberg News reported. The new framework would apply to all banks operating in India, including foreign lenders, according to a document posted Thursday on the Reserve Bank of India’s website.

With the government recently notifying the cross-border insolvency provisions under the insolvency and bankruptcy law, claims of foreign creditors, as well as those of Indian creditors on foreign assets of the company going insolvent, could be satisfied by courts. However, experts believe that notifying the rules is not enough and New Delhi will have to sign agreements with governments of other countries in this regard, the Business Standard reported. Before this, creditors, particularly foreign ones, had been raising this issue.

The Centre is confident that the newly established institutional framework to implement the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) will help improve the country’s ranking in the World Bank’s ease of doing business index, The Hindu BusinessLine reported. “Yes, it is going to help us improve our ranking in ease of doing business,” Arjun Ram Meghwal, Minister of State for Finance, told BusinessLine here. As a regulator for overseeing insolvency proceedings and insolvency related entities, the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India (IBBI) was established in October 2016.

Eighteen foreign banks, including Standard Chartered Plc., Barclays Plc. and Deutsche Bank AG, have agreed to restructure loans to the tune of $550 million given to Jindal Steel and Power Ltd (JSPL), two people aware of the development said, Livemint reported. The lenders agreed to a moratorium of between three and five years on repayments after meeting JSPL chairperson Naveen Jindal earlier this month, the people cited above said on condition of anonymity. Last year, JSPL failed to meet the repayment schedule for the April-June quarter due to stressed cash flows.

Nagpur-based Gupta Coal India has filed for insolvency at the National Company Law Tribunal. The petition says there are liabilities of Rs2,580 crore towards eight major banks, the Business Standard reported. A source told this newspaper, “Allahabad Bank, ICICI Bank, Indian Overseas Bank, Union Bank of India, Vijaya Bank, IDBI Bank, Punjab National Bank and Bank of India are lenders.” Gupta Coal supplied to power generating companies, including Monnet Ispat Energy. This is one of the biggest amounts in question in a petition fied since the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code took effect.