The National Statistical Office (NSO) released National Account Statistics (NAS) tables 2025 on Friday. NAS tables give a detailed break-up of the national income data over and above what is provided in the GDP numbers. To be sure, the NAS data comes with a year’s lag and the 2025 tables give data up to 2023-24. While NAS tables give a lot of information, their data on the household sector, especially its savings part has been widely followed in the post-pandemic
- Total household savings are not very low by historical standardsTotal household savings are defined as the sum of gross financial savings, savings in physical assets, and savings in form of gold and silver ornaments less financial liabilities. The intertemporal trend in this statistic is best seen as tracking savings as a share of nominal GDP. A comparison of the data from 2011-12 to 2023-24 (earliest and latest period for which we have data in the current NAS tables) shows that the 2023-24 number (18.1%) is not very different from what it was 2015-16 and 2016-17. Also, the impression of a sharp fall in household savings is because of a sharp rise in this number in 2020-21, which is perhaps a reflection of forced savings – when households could not spend – because of the lockdown during the pandemic.
- But net financial savings of households are lower because of a sharp increase in financial liabilitiesThis is the most important takeaway from the decomposition of the household savings data. While the current levels of gross financial savings and savings in physical assets are not exactly unprecedented when compared to historical levels, financial liabilities of households have climbed to an all-time high by a distance in 2022-23 and 2023-24 compared to previous levels. This clearly suggests that households have been borrowing at much larger pace than they have in the past decade.
- Most of the rise in household financial liabilities is on account of bank lendingAlmost 99% of the total financial liabilities of households came from band advances in 2023-24. This number saw a sharp increase between 2022-23 and 2023-24 and was at its highest ever in 2023-24. This is reassuring in a way because banks are generally not known to indulge in sub-prime borrowing in India, which generates the confidence that a lot of the increase in borrowing is likely happening on account of borrowers which are considered credit worthy. It is actually interesting to note that the share of bank lending in total household financial liabilities had fallen significantly in the second half of the last decade..
- So, is rising household debt good news or bad news?While a high share of bank lending in total financial savings in 2023-24 makes it tempting to argue that the recent rise in household debt is perhaps on account of people taking more credit to match what could be higher income levels, there is good reason to observe some caution in answering this question. NAS data does not tell us anything about the class-composition of household balance sheets, so we do not know whether the rise in debt is on account of richer or poorer segments of the society. The only official source of class-wise asset and liability data on households are the All-India Debt and Investment Surveys carried out by the National Sample Survey Office. The latest available data (2019) shows that poorer households were more likely to have a high debt to asset ratio than their richer counterparts. If this number has increased further in the forthcoming AIDIS, then one is right in getting worried that household financial health has become more fragile for the poor in the country.
Roshan Kishore is the Data and Political Economy Editor at Hindustan Times. He heads the newsroom's data journalism team, which produces Number Theory, a daily data-driven feature for the print edition and the HT app. Number Theory uses data analysis and story-telling based on it to add value to the newsroom’s daily coverage by putting stories in a larger context on a range of issues, including politics, macroeconomy, markets, global affairs and climate. Under his leadership HT’s data journalism work has established itself as a niche product in Indian journalism and pushed the boundaries of marrying academic rigour with news sense and speed. Along with writing and editing data stories, he has also been writing a weekly political economy column called Terms of Trade for HT Premium. A trained economist with an MPhil degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Kishore has also been a visiting fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania. Along with his journalistic work, his writings have also appeared in journals such as the Economic and Political Weekly and working papers for CASI and UNESCAP.
Abhishek Jha is Assistant Editor-Data at Hindustan Times. He uses statistical programming to generate newsworthy insights from large datasets. He is part of the team that produces Number Theory, a daily data story feature of the paper’s print edition. Since March 2024, he has been writing Weather Bee, a weekly column for the Hindustan Times website. He is a chemical engineer by training, who specialises in stories related to weather, climate, and the environment. Jha has been at HT since 2018, where he offers data-driven perspective and analysis on politics, environment, weather, climate, economy and society. His work includes data coverage of elections in India and abroad, including the 2019 and 2024 Lok Sabha elections; the disasters and extreme weather resulting from changing climate, such as floods, droughts, heat waves, cold waves, and dwindling snow cap in the Himalayas; the factors that drive poor air quality in northern India; the changing patterns of land use; the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on labour market conditions; the changing pattern of consumer spending seen in the new consumer spending surveys; and social norms seen in the surveys such as the National Family Health Survey.