India's crony capitalism claims another victim

RBI was doing good work in tackling bad loans to big business, but judges have decided it went too far. That's a serious blow

You don’t adopt a modern insolvency law in the expectation of damaging the credibility of your central bank. But that’s just what has happened in India.

The country’s Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down a controversial 2018 directive from the Reserve Bank of India, which gave lenders a 180-day deadline to resolve non-performing loans before having to refer the defaulting borrowers to a bankruptcy tribunal.

The verdict is a serious blow to the bank’s officials, who have been trying to tackle one of the world’s worst bad debt problems – with some early success. Yet it’s a huge relief to