India's total external debt stock at the end of December 2011 stood at $334.9 billion, marking an increase of $28.8 billion or 9.4 per cent higher than the March-end estimates of $306.1 billion.
According to an official statement here on Friday, the rise in external debt during the nine-month period of 2011 was largely on account of higher commercial borrowings and increase in short-term trade credit.
As per the quarterly statistics on the country's external debt compiled by the Department of Economic Affairs (DEA), long-term debt stood at $256.9 billion at end-December last year, which works out to an increase of $15.8 billion or 6.5 per cent higher than the end-March 2011 level. The short-term debt, on the other hand, rose by $13.1 billion to $ 78.1 billion to reflect an increase of 20.1 per cent over the same period in the previous year.
However, despite the sharp rise, the short-term debt portion accounted for 23.3 per cent of India's total external debt while the remaining 76.7 per cent was long-term debt. Component-wise, the share of commercial borrowings was the highest at 29.9 per cent, followed by NRI deposits at 15.7 per cent and multilateral debt at 14.9 per cent.
Sovereign debt
As for the sovereign debt component, which stood at $81.2 billion, there was a marginal decline to 24.3 per cent of the total external debt at end-December from $78.1 billion (25.5 per cent) as at end-March 2011.
