Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a $346 billion debt problem that his administration wants help for from the nation’s households.
A record 29.7 trillion rupees ($346 billion) of sovereign bonds are due over the next five years, a result of pandemic-era borrowing and Modi’s infrastructure-spending binge. To tackle the burden, the Reserve Bank of India and the government are swapping maturing debt with longer-dated notes.
These refinancing debt auctions are gaining momentum thanks to an increasingly influential player: households. They’ve been pouring money into insurers, which in turn are buying heaps of long-dated sovereign bonds. The demand is so great that the head of Life Insurance Corp. of India, the nation’s largest, even…
