Twenty five years ago when Aditya Puri and Paresh Sukthankar sat with a band of bankers to tell potential investors in the initial public offering of HDFC Bank what they intended to do in their first three years, few knew what was possible. But regulations demanded they provide a business plan if they wanted capital from public markets.

Pessimism ran high on Dalal Street this week with benchmark indices ending lower in four out of five-sessions. The last-minute respite on Friday came from a handful of stocks, not quelling away the fears of a bear market. Some of the top D-Street analysts believe that we are in this bear phase for the long haul and many blame government policies for the same.

Total bad loans of commercial banks declined by Rs.1.02-lakh-crore to Rs.9.34-lakh-crore in the 2018-19 fiscal on the back of steps taken by the government, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said. Sitharaman said the SCBs effected record recovery of Rs.4,01,424 crore over the last four financial years, including record recovery of Rs.1,56,746-crore during 2018-19 ( provisional data for 2018-19, as reported by RBI on July-9, 2019).