What India pays to borrow: methods
Page: /economy/bonds/ (the old /bonds/ redirects there; the reported-trade detail is /economy/bonds/trades/).
Code: pipeline/tipsheet/compute/economy_bonds.py, publish/economy_bonds.py, step economy_bonds (needs bond_curves, rbi, macro).
Bundles: economy/bonds/*.
Sources
No FBIL, FIMMDA or CCIL figure is used (owner decision: withheld).
| Data | Source | From |
|---|---|---|
| Daily yields on RBI’s benchmark G-secs | RBI home page, Market Trends box, captured each morning by the Data bank (rbi_market_trends). RBI keeps no archive and does not name the source of these yields | 22 Oct 2026 |
| Month-end yields at 1 to 30 years | RBI DBIE report 217, month-end yield of SGL transactions in government dated securities | Apr 1996 |
| Repo rate | RBI policy-rate history (/rbi/) | 2001 |
| CPI inflation | MoSPI, linked across base years as on /macro/ | 2001 (for the real yield) |
| T-bill, G-sec and SDL auction results | RBI auction press releases | Apr 2019 |
| US 10-year Treasury | FRED DGS10 (public domain), month-end | |
| Germany, UK, Japan, Korea 10-year | OECD long-term government bond yields via FRED (citation required), monthly averages | |
| G-sec, SDL and AAA corporate yields by maturity | NSE and BSE reported trades, five sessions (docs/methods/bond_curves.md) |
Measures
- The 10-year yield today: the benchmark whose maturity year is closest to ten years after the as-on date (6.94% GS 2036 in October 2026). RBI shows no maturity date, so “years” is the maturity year less the as-on year. “Higher than N% of months” compares today’s daily value with every RBI month-end ten-year yield since 1996.
- Slope: month-end 10-year minus 1-year yield, in percentage points. Inverted when below zero.
- Real yield: month-end 10-year yield minus CPI inflation for the same month. Backward-looking: it measures the yield against the price rise just seen, not against expected inflation.
- India minus US: month-end yields, both sides.
- State spreads: each SDL auction’s cut-off yield minus the centre’s yield at the same maturity, interpolated linearly on RBI’s month-end curve (flat below one year). The centre’s yield is interpolated in time between the month-ends either side of the auction. Auctions after the latest published month-end wait for the next one: compared with the previous month-end alone, September 2026 auctions read 65 bp against 40 bp for bracketed auctions, because yields rose during the month. Maturity is the stated tenor for new issues, else the maturity year less the auction year. Spreads are weighted by the amount allotted; the state chart shows states with three or more issues in the current financial year.
- Bid cover: competitive bids received over the amount notified, all securities in a day’s G-sec auction.
Checks
- The first daily capture (as on 22 Oct 2026) matches the RBI home page exactly: 6.9816% (2029), 7.2088% (2031), 7.4600% (2036), 7.5956% (2041), 7.8325% (2056).
- Every claim in the chart notes was computed before it was written: inversions (21 of 361 months; 2008, 2012-15, 2017, 2024), real yield below zero (62 months in 2008-13, when CPI inflation averaged 10.2% in 2009-13), smaller states paying more (rank correlation of FY27 spread with log amount raised −0.62 across 22 states), the India-US gap (5.45 pp in 2016, 2.21 pp in Aug 2026).
Licence and downloads
RBI’s terms reserve all rights. Charts that show RBI’s own yields (benchmarks, month-end curves, the 10-year history, T-bill cut-offs) hide their table, CSV and JSON buttons; derived series (slope, real yield, spreads, bid cover) keep them. Each RBI figure carries “Source: Reserve Bank of India” and the hero links to the RBI home page.
Limits
- Daily history starts on 22 Oct 2026; the daily chart appears after three weeks of captures.
- Month-end yields reach the site about six weeks after the month ends (DBIE’s lag), so the curve and history charts trail the daily headline.
- The reported-trade ladder rests on few trades at some maturities;
/economy/bonds/trades/shows every bond behind it.