Banks put brakes on builders

Home sales in India's top property markets fell 8 percent last quarter from year earlier

Indian builders struggling to sell homes amid mounting debt face a new hurdle: reluctant bankers.

"There's a lot of demand from builders and commercial real estate developers for loans," Ranjan Dhawan, Bank of Baroda's Mumbai-based chief executive officer, said. "There's a limit to how many builders we can finance. The current economic scenario has made us very cautious."