Amidst a sense of outrage over big pile of Non-Performing Assets (NPAs) in the public sector banks, the least amount of stress is visible among not- too fancied priority sector borrowers, comprising agriculture and the micro industrial units, according to the latest RBI data.

While the ratio of the gross NPAs, restructured assets and the written off loans , all put together to the total advances,  was 7.9 per cent in the agriculture sector, it was 12.3 per cent in the case of micro industries.

For the small industries, the ratio was 16.8 per cent in September 2015. But the bulk of the rot has taken place among the medium and large scale businesses where the ratio of the combined stressed assets to the advances has been recorded at 31.5 per cent and 23.7 per cent.

In other words, almost every third account among the medium enterprises has slipped into the danger zone while one out of  about four of the large scale businesses faces the threat of NPA.

“Contrary to popular perception, stress relatively is much less in priority sector.  Restructuring is mostly in larger accounts, “according to a presentation prepared by RBI Deputy Governor S S Mundra.

Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha has recently pegged the  total size of the stressed assets at a whopping Rs eight lakh crore. With Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan taking a tough stand and asking the banks to  firewall themselves by full provisioning , the state-owned lenders have been reporting their worst kind of  financial results for the October-December,2015 quarter.

Consequently, the PSU banking shares have come in for a brutal hammering in the stock markets.  Taking a serious note of the deteriorating situation, the Supreme Court has also asked the RBI and the government for a list of defaulters owing more than Rs 500 crore each to the banks.

Under such a dismal scenario, it is no surprise that the medium scale industrial enterprises have witnessed a negative 7.5 per cent credit deployment annualized growth in December, 2015. For the micro and small units, the growth of credit has been just about 2.5 per cent.

Thus, the humble priority sector borrowers have caused the least amount of stress to the banking system despite being left to fend for themselves in a challenging business environment marked by disinflationary trends in a host of manufacturing sectors.