India's banks, one by one.

Each line is a bank group's bad loans as a share of what it has lent. The rise from 2015 was not a sudden wave of new defaults. In 2015 the RBI's asset quality review made banks classify loans they had been rolling over as bad, mostly loans to steel, power, infrastructure and construction firms made in the boom of 2004 to 2011. The ratio then fell as banks wrote off loans, sold them, recovered them under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code of 2016, and lent afresh.

A falling ratio can come from fewer bad loans or from more lending: both shrink the share. Write-offs also lower it without anyone repaying.

Two panels, the same four groups. Public sector banks are owned by the government; private sector banks by shareholders; foreign banks are branches of banks headquartered abroad; small finance banks, licensed from 2016, lend mostly to small borrowers. The shares of the four add to 100. Local area banks and the unscheduled small finance banks sit outside the all-bank total and are not shown.

The groups change as banks move between them. IDBI Bank was reclassified as private in 2019 after LIC bought control, which moved more than two points of the market in one quarter without a single customer switching banks.

The bar is the bank's share of all deposits today, the open dot its share at the end of 2013. Where the bar runs far past the dot, the bank grew faster than the market, or absorbed other banks: State Bank of India took in its five associates in 2017, HDFC Bank merged with its parent HDFC Ltd in 2023, and Bank of Baroda, Punjab National Bank, Canara Bank and Union Bank of India each absorbed smaller public sector banks in 2019 and 2020.

A line below zero is a loss. Public sector banks lost money from 2015-16 to 2019-20 because the provisions they had to make against bad loans exceeded what they earned on good ones. The government covered the gap with fresh capital. Profits returned as the old bad loans were provided for, recovered or written off, and as interest rates rose after 2022.

Capital is the cushion that absorbs losses before depositors' money is at risk: the shareholders' money and retained profits. Risk-weighted assets count a home loan at a fraction of its value and an unsecured corporate loan at full value, so the ratio rises when banks hold safer assets as well as when they raise capital. Public sector banks' ratios held up through the bad-loan years mostly because the government recapitalised them.

The cost of funds is roughly the interest a bank pays on deposits and borrowings; the yield is what it earns on loans and investments. The net interest margin is the difference, measured on the bank's interest-earning assets. It pays for branches, staff and bad loans before anything is left as profit. When the RBI raises its policy rate, loan rates usually move first and deposit rates later, so margins widen for a while; the reverse happens when rates fall.

Each row is a bank, ranked by how much it has lent. The line joins its bad-loan ratio at the 2018 peak (open dot) to the latest quarter (filled dot). Banks formed or merged since have no comparable 2018 figure: Bank of Baroda, Punjab National Bank, Canara Bank, Union Bank of India and Indian Bank absorbed others in 2019 and 2020, so their 2018 dots describe the smaller bank they were.

Return on assets is profit after tax as a share of everything the bank holds. One per cent is a healthy figure for a bank; two per cent is exceptional. A bank can earn more by charging more on loans, paying less for deposits (current and savings accounts cost banks far less than fixed deposits), earning fees, or having fewer bad loans to provide for.

State Bank of India absorbed its five associate banks and Bharatiya Mahila Bank on 1 April 2017; Bank of Baroda took in Vijaya and Dena banks on 1 April 2019; Punjab National Bank, Canara Bank and Union Bank of India took in Oriental Bank of Commerce, United Bank, Syndicate, Andhra and Corporation banks on 1 April 2020; HDFC Ltd merged into HDFC Bank on 1 July 2023. The absorbed banks' own series end in the quarter before. Comparing a bank's size across one of these dates compares two different banks.

The bad-loan cycle was an industrial one. Large loans to steel, power, roads and telecom companies failed together when projects stalled and demand fell short. Farm loans go bad for other reasons, such as a failed monsoon or a loan waiver that teaches borrowers to wait, and stay high for longer. Retail loans (homes, cars, cards, education) are many small loans to salaried people, and their ratio barely moved.

A home loan is secured on the house and taken by people who usually keep paying; a credit-card balance is unsecured and carries interest of 30 to 45 per cent a year, so a missed payment snowballs. Education loans had the highest bad-loan ratio of any retail loan in the 2010s, when many borrowers could not find jobs that paid enough to repay.

Infrastructure loans are long and large: a power plant or a highway takes years to build before it earns anything. Much of the bad-loan cycle began here. Energy covers power generation, transmission and distribution (much of it to state electricity boards) and oil and gas storage; transport covers roads, ports, airports and railways.

Rural means a place of fewer than 10,000 people, semi-urban 10,000 to one lakh, urban one to ten lakh, and metropolitan ten lakh and more. After fourteen banks were nationalised in 1969, the RBI required banks to open four rural branches for every urban one, and rural branches multiplied. From the 1990s the rule was relaxed and banks closed loss-making rural branches. Financial inclusion drives from 2011, and the Jan Dhan accounts of 2014, took them back out, often as small branches and business correspondents.

Regional rural banks are government-sponsored banks that lend in villages; small finance banks grew out of microfinance companies licensed in 2016, which is why they start near zero. A branch here is a full branch; the RBI counts ATMs, digital banking units and business correspondents separately.

The count falls when the RBI cancels licences of failed banks or weak banks merge into stronger ones. A scheduled UCB is one large enough to be on the RBI's second schedule; the rest are non-scheduled, and they carry most of the bad loans. Each year the RBI first publishes a provisional figure and revises it a year later; this chart shows the latest figure for each March.

Each bar is the money depositors keep in a state's urban co-operative banks. Maharashtra's lead comes from a century of co-operative banking in Mumbai, Pune and the sugar belt; Gujarat and Karnataka follow. In much of the north and east urban co-operative banks are rare, and the commercial and regional rural banks serve the same towns.

The RBI's inspectors rate every urban co-operative bank on its capital, asset quality, management, earnings and liquidity. A bank rated D or E is under close watch; such banks are the ones that end up under the RBI's directions, with withdrawals capped, as happened to Punjab and Maharashtra Co-operative Bank in 2019. The ratings are the RBI's own and are not published bank by bank.

A non-banking financial company lends like a bank but cannot take ordinary savings deposits or issue cheques. It borrows from banks and the bond market instead. NBFCs reach borrowers banks find too small or too risky: gold loans, two-wheeler loans, loans to small traders and microfinance. The RBI regulates them in layers by size; the largest, such as Bajaj Finance and Shriram Finance, are watched almost as closely as banks.

These institutions lend mostly to other lenders, not to the public. NABARD refinances banks' farm loans and runs the Rural Infrastructure Development Fund, into which banks that miss their farm-lending targets must deposit the shortfall. SIDBI refinances loans to small enterprises, NHB to housing, and EXIM Bank finances exports and lines of credit to other countries.

Deposit insurance covers each depositor's money in each bank up to the limit, adding savings, current and fixed deposits together. The share of money insured fell for two decades as deposits grew and the ₹1 lakh limit stayed where it was set in 1993; it jumped when the limit rose to ₹5 lakh in 2020, and has drifted down again since. The share of accounts fully covered is far higher, because most accounts are small.