In this article, all the Indian banks—public, private and foreign are ordered on the basis of performance indices developed for measuring the relative performance of a bank. The index used here is based on two performance indicators for solvency and profitability. The ranking of the banks is done not only at one point of time, but the performance of a bank is compared over the years also. From the analysis it is observed that though the foreign banks top the list, public sector banks as well as the private banks have improved themselves to enter the top 30 list. Notably, public sector banks are quite capable of competing with their private and foreign counterparts.

It is by now a stylized fact that there has been a sea change in the Indian banking industry since it was introduced to
competition in accordance with the recommendations of the first Narsimhan Committee in 1991. Since then with greater integration of financial services, operating environment for banks, supervisory approaches and financial markets underwent significant transformation. Banks had to respond suitably, for their own sake, to the challenges of the changing environment by adopting appropriate measures by which they tried to promote efficiencyand profitability as well as solvency. With this wave of transition, commercial banks have started going beyond what their traditional
role permits1. As the prima facie evidences suggest, the Indian banking system, consisting of an array of banks with divergent resource base, functional coverage and clientele, has become more competitive in recent years2. A number of studies have been done in recent years to gauge the performance of Indian banks in the changed environment. Indian banks are ranked by financial dailies very often, but such rankings lack economic logic whereas, themethods of comparison are not reported. Moreover, not all the banks are taken into account and often some selected 50 or 60 banks are taken3. The process of such random selection of banks at the very first stage makes the comparison meaningless. In this article, we rank all the banks, public, economically meaningful way on the basis of performance index developed by Mukherjee(2004).* This index is based on two key elements of banking viz. profitability and solvency and measures the achievement of a bank relative to the group or industry in terms of some specified performance indicators. The article is organized as follows. The next section looks at the recent trend in the performance of Indian banks; then the description of the index as well as data is presented, the next section describes the results and the final section concludes.

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