RBI's deadline to clean up bad loans may hit banks profit: SBI

State Bank of India chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya today said banks are apprehensive about the Reserve Bank of India's deadline of March 2017 for banks to clean up their balance sheets as the move may affect lenders bottomline. "Because the regulator has given this call that you need to clean up everything by March 2017, there is some kind of a apprehension that if it is all compressed into a very short period of time then there may be very large hits," Bhattacharya said today. It could be noted that in the last policy, RBI governor Raghuram Rajan had said the central bank would want to put something like March 2017 on the table by when clean-up of balance sheets of banks will have to be done.

Bhattacharya further said that there are positive movement happening. "So we will see how thing pan out and at this point of time it does not make sense to conjecture on these matters," she added.