PE investors see profit in India's troubles in shadow banking, real estate

Four foreign pension plans have committed between $100 million and $400 million each to private-equity funds investing in India since Sept. 2018.

India’s financial crisis has hit ordinary people hard. School teachers and electrical engineers have seen their pension savings get stuck in bonds of defaulted institutions. More than a million depositors of a cooperative bank can’t access their cash. 

Homeowners have spent billions of dollars on apartments that will never be finished. Yet for workers in rich nations, the blowup in India’s shadow-banking and real-estate industries is an opportunity. Will they profit from it or get burned like their Indian counterparts? The answer will depend on the skill of money managers — and the Indian government’s eagerness to douse the fire