Note4Students

From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :

Prelims level: BIFR

Mains level: Paper 3- Performance of IBC

Context

The performance of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) has been under intense scrutiny.

Basis for the criticism of IBC

The Code has been mainly criticised on three counts:
1] Delay in resolution: There are inordinate delays in the resolution procedure.
2] Liquidation: There have been more liquidations than resolutions.
3] Low recovery amount: The recovery amounts under IBC are not substantial, making it more of a talking point than an effective structural reform.

Is the criticism about the delay justified?

Assessing IBC based only on the average time taken to resolve successful cases does a substantial disservice to how much more efficient the IBC is compared to the previous regimes.
It is calculated by taking a simple average of time taken on each completed case.
This is one of the metrics used by the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India (IBBI) to compare the IBC regime with the earlier Board of Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR) regime.
However, the performance of a bankruptcy resolution should ideally be evaluated along at least three dimensions:
The average time taken to resolve a case, the fraction of cases resolved within a given timeframe, and the recovery rate conditional on resolution.
Focusing on any single parameter may result in a gross under (over) estimation of the IBC’s (BIFR’s) performance.
By examining the fraction of cases that are resolved within a specific timeframe, we see that for any fraction of the total cases resolved under each scheme, the IBC took considerably less time than BIFR.
Total number of cases solved: Since its inception in 1987, the BIFR has resolved less than 3,500 cases while the IBC, since it was launched in 2016, resolved about 1,178 cases until it was suspended at the onset of the COVID pandemic.
Most analyses of IBC’s performance overlook the important fact that many of the legacy BIFR cases were subsumed by IBC, and these were often zombie firms that were kept alive due to massive evergreening of loans between 2008-2015.