Fitch Ratings on Monday said Indian banks have performed robustly in the first nine months of the current financial year with the sector's impaired loan ratio close to the trough. In its commentary, Fitch said improvements in key performance metrics of Indian banks in the past few years will provide strong support for their Viability Ratings (VRs). The global rating agency also said that Indian banks' risk appetites have been more calibrated since 2018, with efforts to diversify loans and improve the quality of corporate exposures contributing to lower bad loan formation. Lower legacy bad loans drove improvement in banks' gross impaired loan ratios and earnings, Fitch said. However, these risk enhancements have yet to be fully tested, and banks have tended to vary risk appetite through cycles, such as growth in unsecured personal loans in recent years until regulatory measures discouraged this behaviour, Fitch noted. "Indian banks performed robustly in the first nine months of the