New Delhi: Niti Aayog Vice Chairman Rajiv Kumar blamed the slowdown in economic growth in six quarters starting from the last quarter of 2015-16 to rise in non-performing loans of banks and not the November 2016 demonetisation as claimed in many quarters.GDP growth had hit a peak of 9.3% in fourth quarter of 2015-16 and subsequently declined steadily to hit a low of 5.6% in first quarter of 2017-18, the second full quarter after of demonetisation.“The growth was declining because of the rising NPAs in the banking sector,” Kumar told ANI in an interview on Monday.“When this (Narendra Modi) government came to office, that figure was about Rs 4 lakh crore. It rose to Rs 10.5 lakh crore by the middle of 2017, because under the previous RBI governor Mr (Raghuram) Rajan, they had instituted a new mechanism to identify stressed NPAs.”Rajiv Kumar said rising NPAs stalled credit disbursal to the industry and in the case of the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) industry, credit actually shrank.In December 2015, the RBI initiated an asset quality review (AQR) to ensure banks were taking proactive steps to cleanup their books, listing 150 borrowers that were to be downgraded as NPAs.“Our intent is to have clean and fully provisioned bank balance sheets by March 2017,” Rajan had said in a speech in February 2016.Gross NPAs of scheduled commercial banks rose from Rs 3.23 lakh crore at the end of March 2015 to Rs 6.1 lakh crore by March 2016 and Rs 10.4 lakh crore by March 2018.“Even to the large industry, the growth of credit came down to one per cent and two and a half per cent in some months, and even negative in some quarters. Never had we seen such a continuous and persistent year upon year deleveraging of credit,”Kumar said. “This is the cause of slowdown of growth.”“This (decline in growth) was just simply in continuation of a trend and not because of the shock of demonetisation as has been claimed. I think there is no evidence to prove that there was a direct link between demonetisation and slowdown in the growth rate,” he added.Kumar said government compensated for this by ramping up public capital expenditure, using he oil revenue bonanza in ramping up the capital expenditure while maintaining fiscal prudence.“So it has been because of the government that you have now seen a rise in the quarterly growth rate since the second quarter of 2017-18,” he explained.On demonetisation, Kumar said it intensified the crackdown on black money and benami transactions in the economy. “My views on GDP’s decline being unrelated to solely demonetisation & having begun way before with stricter norms of NPA by RBI under Mr Rajan R fact-based & self-explanatory but some misleading headlines have coerced me to reiterate that the discussion is on policies not people,” Kumar tweeted later.