Purpose The issue of mounting non-performing assets (NPAs) in Indian banking industry is serious and attracting attention of academia and policy planners. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to test the hypothesis whether NPAs in Indian commercial banking have reached at alarming state where they start affecting the technical efficiency levels adversely or not. Design/methodology/approach The efficiency score have been computed using case model (model with NPAs as bad/undesirable output) vs control model (model without NPAs as bad/undesirable output) methodology under meta-frontier data envelopment analysis framework. Findings It has been noticed that the effect of NPAs on overall technical efficiency and its various components is insignificant. The comparison of the case models (i.e. model with NPAs as bad output) with the control models (i.e. model without NPAs) reveals insignificant difference in average efficiency scores and rank distribution of commercial banks. The major source of inefficiency is technology gap (i.e. structure, setup and objectives of banking) among public, domestic private and foreign private categories of banks. Practical implications Though NPAs are increasing in Indian banking industry and specifically in Indian public sector banks because of their compulsory lending to priority sector yet the banks have huge scope to extend credit to priority sector as the NPAs have not reached at alarming stage where they start affecting adversely the efficiency performance. Originality/value Given the fact that the banking penetrations, structure and objectives differ significantly across ownership, separate frontiers for each ownership (public, private and foreign banks) category has been used to evaluate the technical efficiency levels of 81 commercial banks operating in India over the period 2005 to 2013.