IN a letter written to the prime minister on October 4, regarding the proposal to create a “bad bank” as the solution proposed by the government to overcome the humongous amounts of outstanding NPAs by the corporates, Sitaram Yechury, general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), noted that bad loan provisioning for most State-owned banks doubled – and even trebled in some cases – in 2015-16, as shown by recent reports. To make matters worse, the core earnings of most of these banks have fallen grossly short of the requirement for bad loan provisioning.