Debt and house prices from BIS and RBI

Two economy pages read India’s debt and house prices from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the RBI: /economy/money/debt/ (how indebted is India?) and /economy/households/homes/ (what are homes costing?). They describe; they forecast nothing.

Code: compute/economy_debt.py, publish/economy_debt.py, steps/economy_debt.py (after the bis step, whose tables it reads). Bundles: economy/debt/facts, india, peers. Tests: pipeline/tests/test_economy_debt.py.

Inputs

• BIS (Data bank bis_series, via the bis step’s derived tables): total credit to households, non-financial companies and general government as % of GDP at market value (WS_TC), quarterly from 1951 for private credit and 2007 for households; the credit-to-GDP ratio, trend and gap (WS_CREDIT_GAP); the private sector’s debt service ratio (WS_DSR, from 1999); real residential property prices (WS_SPP, from 2010, BIS’s series for India built from RBI data and deflated by CPI); and the same borrower ratios for fourteen peer economies and the emerging and advanced aggregates. BIS’s terms allow reproduction with BIS cited as the source and no implied endorsement; every chart names it.
• RBI’s all-India house price index, 2022-23 base, quarterly from April-June 2022 (India Data Hub, publisher RBI). Only its growth on a year earlier is published; the index level stays out of the bundles.

Measures

• Debt by borrower, latest quarter and a year earlier; the highest and lowest since each series begins.
• The credit-to-GDP gap: BIS’s own published gap (WS_CREDIT_GAP), not a Tipsheet calculation. BIS takes the ratio of private credit to GDP and subtracts a trend from a one-sided Hodrick-Prescott filter with λ = 400,000, estimated each quarter on data up to that quarter only, so no later data enters an earlier value. India’s series begins in 1961. Basel III guidance for the countercyclical capital buffer starts the buffer at a gap of 2 points and sets it at its maximum from 10; the page draws both lines and reports the current run above or below 2 points and when the gap was last on the same side before it.
• The private debt service ratio: interest and principal payments as a share of income.
• India against peers: how many of the other economies shown have higher household and private debt.

A check on the 2025-26 rise

Private credit rose from 96.0% to 105.1% of GDP in the year to January-March 2026. Government debt to GDP moved smoothly over the same quarters, so the rise is not a step in the GDP denominator (a GDP revision would move every ratio); bank credit grew about twice as fast as nominal GDP over the year.

What the numbers cannot tell

Debt ratios rise when credit outgrows nominal GDP and fall when inflation lifts GDP. The credit gap’s trend is slow to adjust, so a recovery after a long fall (India, 2012-2016) can read as a boom. House price indices follow registered sales in large cities.