Manoj Sharma (name changed to protect privacy), a 27-year old Central government employee in Delhi, got a rude shock a few days ago when the credit limit on his Barclays Bank credit card was sniped by almost half to Rs 10,000 from Rs 18,000 he enjoyed for the past 14 months. Rude because Sharma had actually made a case with Barclays for a hike in his credit limit.

When he got back to the bank, the helpdesk couldn’t give him much justification for the cut in his credit limit. “A representative just told me that the bank had been doing this to a lot of customers lately, though it wasn’t clear why,” Sharma told The Indian Express. He claimed to have a fairly clean credit history on it. About a fortnight later, Sharma got an e-mail from Barclays saying “the bank reserves the right to revise a customer’s credit limit but that same is not necessarily an indicator of your financial standing… request you to contact us after six months for us to review your card account limit enhancement.”

Sharma is not alone to wake up to the real credit crunch hitting the Indian bourgeois. Credit card subscription grew at a phenomenal 40 per cent on an average over the last four years. There are as many as 25 million credit card holders in India and the numbers had grown at a phenomenal 40 per cent a year over the last four years with India maintaining a healthy growth rate of 9 per cent plus.

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