The hack to finding out about the health of a cow is to look at its teeth, they say. Now, if you opened the mouth of India's credit growth, what would that look like? At Rs 39.3 lakh crore (~$476 billion), personal loans accounted for 30%—also the largest proportion—of non-food credit in India as on 30 December 2022, showed the latest bank-credit data by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) . “This phase of credit growth has a lot of firsts—foremost, that people and not industries lead it,” said DK Srivastava, chief economic advisor at professional-services firm EY India. Rounak, the author of today's story, examined this growth to find that it is driven by people taking loans to buy more expensive things—from luxury homes to luxury cars. Sales of apartments priced over Rs 1.5 crore ($181,300) have doubled in 2022 in India. Luxury projects priced above Rs 2.5 crore ($302,000) in tier-1 cities are getting sold out at the pre-launch stage itself, said a real-estate executive. Luxury-car sales are not far behind either - the Mercedes Benz and BMW saw a year-on-year sales growth of 41% and 37%, respectively, largely driven by the demand in tier-1 cities. And this credit growth is driven by the 30-somethings. This means companies—from banks to real-estate developers to car dealers—are changing the way they look, and the way they sell, to cater to this changing nature of credit growth. But this growth is skewed and comes with several warning signs. Read today's free article only on www.multimediastudio.net about India's credit growth through a set of characters who have a ringside view to this show of GROWTH
