<p>India needs to minimise political interference in public sector banks, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on Friday (14 August), as the government announced measures to improve the performance of state-run banks that are struggling with rising bad loans.<br><br>India's banking sector, dominated by more than two-dozen state-run lenders, has been hobbled by its highest bad-loan ratio in a decade as slower economic expansion hurt companies' ability to service debt.<br><br>While the pace of additions to bad loans has started slowing for most banks, higher provisioning is hurting their profits. State-run lenders also account for a majority of the sector's bad loans.<br><br>(Reuters)</p>
