State of Indian Retail Bonds — Q2 2026

30522 bonds across 9528 issuers, 96% investment grade, a default history still dominated by one 2018 crisis, and an NCD public-issue market that has quietly quadrupled since then. This is the baseline our future quarterly editions will measure against.

The Market, By The Numbers

We track 30522 active bonds from 9528 issuers. By count, the market is overwhelmingly corporate NCDs — 27428 of them, versus a few hundred State Development Loans and a small slice of G-Secs and T-Bills. That's a count, not a value: a single G-Sec issue typically outsizes hundreds of privately placed NCDs by outstanding rupee value, so read this as "how many distinct instruments trade," not "who owns the market."

Credit Quality

Of the 10525 bonds carrying a current rating, 96% sit at BBB or above. The distribution skews toward the top: AAA alone accounts for 36% of all currently-rated paper.

Defaults Are Still an IL&FS Story

Of 363 bonds flagged defaulted in depository records, 153 (42%) trace back to the IL&FS group alone — the 2018 shadow-banking collapse that remains, seven years on, the single largest credit event in this dataset. The next-largest single-issuer default, Tulip Telecom, doesn't come close.

Full registry: /defaults.

The NCD Public-Issue Market Has Quadrupled Since 2018

BSE's own filing archive — the only genuinely multi-year series in this report — shows NCD public-issue DRHP filings rising from 11 in 2018 to a peak of 42 in 2024, before easing to 37 in 2025. 2026 has 19 filings recorded through the first half of the year — on pace with, not behind, recent years.

"Opened" = reached the final Prospectus filing stage. Full pipeline with issuer links: /ncd-calendar.

Q2 2026's Opened Issues

• 2026-04-08 — Capri Global Capital Ltd
• 2026-05-15 — Kosamattam Finance Ltd
• 2026-05-29 — Muthoot Mercantile Limited
• 2026-06-01 — PRACHAY CAPITAL Ltd
• 2026-06-04 — Edelweiss Financial Services Ltd

Where Rates Sit

The sovereign curve is normally shaped and upward-sloping: 2.89% at the 3-month T-Bill, 5.69% at 1 year, climbing to 6.67% at the 10-year benchmark and 7.34% at 30 years. The 2s10s spread stands at 109 bps — positive and unremarkable, the shape of a curve pricing in neither imminent easing nor an inversion scare. Full curve: /yield-curve.

The Fiscal Backdrop

General government debt stands at 84.1% of GDP (2025, IMF), 0.7 percentage points below the prior year and well off the 90.6% COVID-year peak. More immediately: the Union government's FY26 fiscal deficit is running 7.0% below FY25 at the same point in the year, through Feb 2026 — a real fiscal-consolidation signal, not a projection. Full dashboard: /india-debt.

Gold Bonds: Trading Near Parity

Across 45 live Sovereign Gold Bond tranches, the average secondary-market price sits within a rounding error of the underlying gold value — -1.09% on average. The oldest tranches, issued when gold traded at a fraction of today's price, show since-issue returns in the hundreds of percent — almost entirely gold's own multi-year rally, not anything specific to the bond structure. Full tracker: /sgb-tracker.

An Early Signal, Labeled Honestly

Since we started tracking on 2026-06-16 — just over two weeks as of this report — CRISIL alone has logged 5141 rating actions: 226 upgrades against 95 downgrades. That's a 2.4:1 ratio in favor of upgrades — worth watching, not worth calling a trend off two and a half weeks of one agency's actions. Live feed: /ratings.

What Report #2 Will Be Able to Show

By the next quarterly edition, we'll have a genuine quarter of our own rating-action and pricing history to compare against what's written here — real upgrade/downgrade momentum, real yield movement, not a two-week snapshot dressed up as one. That's the point of publishing a baseline now: so the next report has something honest to measure against.