New Delhi: The Central Bank of India has recovered more loans from small borrowers who had defaulted than it did from institutional or corporate borrowers in the same position. Over the ten financial years from 2016–17 to 2025–26, the bank recovered Rs 5,004.28 crore from depositors who owed it less than Rs 1 crore, reports MoneyLife.By contrast, the bank recovered only Rs 3,874.41 crore from the large borrwers, each of which owed it more than Rs 100 crore.Central Bank wrote off loans amounting to Rs 26,701.55 crore of the big borrowers who were in default. In the case of the smaller borrowers, it wrote off Rs 6,774.23 crore.In percentage terms, the recovery rate from big borrowers was 14.5%, whereas the recovery rate from small borrowers was 74%.These details are included in an reply to an application by Pune-based RTI activist Vivek Velankar, president of Sajag Nagrik Manch, reported by MoneyLife.The recoveries being made in loan default cases continues beyond the period when it has been written off. However, the names of the companies that are in default is not fully revealed by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).The figures revealed via RTI illustrate a skew in the bank’s as well as the borrowers’ behaviour. While those borrowing large sums of capital contribute a large majority to the overall loan write-offs, the smaller defaulters make up for lower write-offs and tend to repay at least portions of their loans more reliably.MoneyLife points out that Central Bank of India has “refused to name a single one of the large defaulters whose written-off dues run into thousands of crores of rupees”.The RBI, too, published a list of “wilful defaulters”, which is a subset of the companies whose loans have been written off or declared Non-performing assets. That disclosure was also under the RTI Act, in April 2020. In November 2025, in response to a RTI application filed by The Wire in May that year, the RBI released a list of 30 such defaulters.As The Wire had then reported, a clutch of RTI applications filed in 2011 seeking information from the RBI had reached the Central Information Commission’s (CIC) doorstep, then led by Shailesh Gandhi. He directed the RBI to disclose the information asked by petitioners, including a list of wilful defaulters.Citing Velankar, the MoneyLife story says that the RTI applicant holds banking regulator RBI and the Union ministry of finance “equally responsible” for being “silent spectators” to this pattern of recoveries He said the Central Bank of India’s board of directors should be held accountable.