Outstanding loans on credit cards stood at about $6 billion at the end of August, up a staggering 86 per cent from a year ago.

NO CHECKS, LITTLE SECURITY

Until about two decades ago a father would raise a loan from friends and family or take an advance from his retirement benefits to marry off a daughter or buy a house.

But as the economy opened up, credit providers distributed loans indiscriminately with little care for the credit-worthiness of the debtors -- it became common to be accosted by credit card agents or offered a loan with virtually no demand for a security. "If you produce your plane boarding pass, you might be able to obtain a credit card as you exit the airport terminal," Manmohan Agrawal, executive director of Axis Bank, said in a Wharton School business report last year.

Defaults were bound to follow. Consumer credit repayments three months or more overdue form about 7-9 per cent of total loans outstanding this year, and, Crisil says, could touch 15 per cent.

India has about 30 million credit cardholders, a number that has tripled over the past five years as private and foreign banks chose plastic to break into the Indian market.

Indians put $14 billion on their cards in fiscal 2008, more than three times the amount charged four years earlier.

Last month, police broke open the door of a Mumbai apartment and recovered the bodies of A.K. Nair -- both had swallowed poison -- and their two dead children.

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