On August 21, 19-year-old Kunal Chandgude climbed Khavda Hill on the outskirts of Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar after an argument with his father over the EMI on an iPhone he could not afford to keep paying off. Hours later, he fell from the edge. His father Murlidhar, who had rushed forward to pull him back, fell with him. His mother Sangita, watching, jumped moments after. All three died at the spot.
A similar dispute played out in Hyderabad in May, when a 42-year-old woman died after a fight with her husband over an iPhone purchase turned fatal.
Two isolated tragedies, unconnected on the surface. But both sit on top of a pattern that shows up clearly in the Reserve Bank of India’s own numbers: a generation of borrowers taking on debt to fund purchases that outstrip what they earn, at a pace even the regulator is struggling to stay ahead of.
iPhone As Status Symbol
Apple does not publish India-specific affordability data, but the financing industry does. Nearly 42% of all smartphones sold in India this year will be bought on EMI, according to Counterpoint Research’s financing tracker.
In the premium segment, the price band iPhones dominate, that rises to nearly two in every three purchases. Apple sits at the extreme end of the curve on tenure too, carrying the longest average repayment period of any smartphone brand in the country at 17.2 months in the second quarter of 2026, against a 10-month average across the mainline retail channel.
A longer EMI tenure does not mean a cheaper phone. It means a buyer stretching payments further into the future to make an unaffordable purchase look manageable on a monthly basis.
The average regular salaried employee in India earned about Rs 20,700 a month in 2023-24, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey. Fewer than one in a hundred Indian workers earns Rs 1 lakh a month or more, based on an analysis of income tax filings against labour force data. A Rs 75,000 iPhone, on that arithmetic, is priced for an earning bracket most of the country will never enter.
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Apple’s India business has never had a better run regardless. The company shipped close to 14 million iPhones in the country in 2025, taking a record 9% share of smartphone shipments, up from 7% the year before. Smartphones priced above Rs 30,000 grew 15% year on year, their highest share of shipments on record. Financing is doing much of the work behind that growth.
What The RBI Is Watching
Household debt in India stood at 41.3% of GDP at the end of March 2025, according to the RBI’s Financial Stability Report released in December that year, already above the five-year average of 38.3%. Six months later, the June 2026 edition of the same report put the figure at 45.5% of GDP, as of September 2025. That is a jump of nearly four percentage points across two consecutive half-yearly assessments.
The composition matters more than the headline number. Non-housing retail loans, personal loans, credit cards and consumer durable loans among them, now make up 58.4% of total household debt, up from around 50% as recently as 2019-20. Housing loans, the kind that build an asset, account for just 26.3%. India is borrowing more than ever, and increasingly, to consume rather than to build.
The EMI based consumption figures have been rising fast in India.
Photo Credit: NDTV Profit
Gold loans have grown fastest of all. Outstanding bank lending against gold jewellery rose from Rs 3.16 lakh crore in September 2025 to Rs 4.89 lakh crore by April 2026, a 55% jump in seven months, as households lean on a family’s most liquid asset to fund current spending.
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Gen Z Enters The Credit System, Fast
The RBI’s data does not break debt down by age, but credit bureau numbers fill the gap. Gen Z accounted for 41% of all new-to-credit borrowers in India in 2025-26, according to TransUnion CIBIL. Four in ten of them entered the formal credit system not through a home loan or a car loan but through a credit card, a personal loan or a consumer durable loan, often a phone.
That entry point is now dominated by fintech lenders. They hold close to 57% of the market for small-ticket personal loans under Rs 50,000, and 70.5% of their loan books are unsecured, with roughly half going to borrowers under 35.
Delinquencies on these small-ticket loans stood at 6.4% as of March 2026, well above the 1.7% gross NPA ratio for unsecured retail loans overall, a sign that the youngest, newest borrowers are already under more strain than the market as a whole.
India’s borrowing pattern has changed fast. A closer look.
Photo Credit: NDTV Profit
India’s credit card base has swelled to 5.2 crore holders as of March 2026, up 3.6 times since 2016. Outstanding balances have grown even faster, up 8.3 times over the same period to Rs 3.1 lakh crore. The average debt carried by an individual borrower has climbed to Rs 4.78 lakh, from Rs 3.41 lakh in March 2018.
Two Pictures Of The Same Economy
None of this shows up yet as a full-blown crisis. Bank balance sheets remain healthy, with gross non-performing assets at a multi-decade low of 1.8%, and the Economic Survey 2025-26 counted healthier household balance sheets among the reasons behind India’s growth. But that survey was tabled in January, five months before the RBI’s own warning about the shifting shape of that debt. Read together, the two documents describe a household sector that looks sound on paper and increasingly stretched underneath it.
For a teenager on a hillside in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, that gap was not abstract.
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