India Inc debt inches up 3.7% in FY20, deleveraging limited to a few firms

There was also an uptick in companies' gross debt-equity ratio on higher borrowings while profits declined for several companies last fiscal

India Inc’s dependence on debt to meet funding requirements continued in the financial year 2019-20, with the BSE500 companies excluding banking and financial services firms reporting a 3.7 per cent year-on-year (YoY) increase in their borrowings. 

The combined borrowings of the remaining 307 BSE500 companies stood at Rs 23.35 trillion at the end of March this year, compared with Rs 22.7 trillion in September 2019 and Rs 22.5 trillion in March 2019.

On Wednesday, veteran banker K V Kamath said top Indian companies had never been as deleveraged as they were today. The data, however, shows that this deleveraging is limited to