How far the Indian banking sectors are efficient? : an empirical investigation

Purpose - Bank mobilizes savings and transforms it into credit for investments in various sectors, which helps the economy running. The purpose of this paper is to examine the efficiency of three bank groups in India with data spanning from 2009-2010 to 2018-2019. Design/methodology/approach - The study uses data envelopment analysis for measuring the efficiency of the selected banks. It measures the efficiency both from the revenue dimension and from the supply-side dimension of financial inclusion. Findings - The study finds that foreign banks on average are working efficiently far better than the public-sector and private-sector banks. It indicates that foreign banks in India are operating at 92.53% efficiency level, whereas private- and public-sector banks are operating at 90.20 and 86.04% efficiency levels, respectively. Further, the result of the Friedman test reveals that there is no significant difference in efficiency scores amongst these three bank groups. As major challenges, non-performing assets of the banking industry to be reduced by 15% as radial and 53.18% as slack. Originality/value - One of the notable innovativeness of this study is that, unlike most of the previous studies that are mostly selected few banks and specific group, the present study may place itself as a unique inquiry in the domain of technical efficiency in macro concept by considering three major bank groups operating in India. An important contribution of the study is the classification of reasons behind the inefficiency, i.e. managerial or inappropriate scale size and further projections of input factors for the same level of output.