Credit rating agencies (CRAs) in India occupy a paradoxical position: their ratings shape investor behaviour, influence borrowing costs, and determine market access for corporations, yet they operate within a regulatory and commercial architecture that structurally disincentivizes critical scrutiny and accountability. The issuer-pays model — wherein the rated entity pays the rater — creates endogenous conflicts of interest that privilege quantifiable metrics like capital adequacy and liquidity while marginalizing qualitative governance and forensic risks. This article argues that under such a regime, investment-grade ratings (including the recent CRISIL AA+/Stable assigned to Piramal Finance in early 2026) function less as independent credit assessments and more as manufactured assurances that legitimize capital flows for well-connected conglomerates. Drawing on legal, financial, and political economy frameworks, this piece situates India’s CRA ecosystem within a broader pattern of regulatory compliance without substantive responsibility, oligopolistic market concentration, and political-corporate crony interlocks. It contends that ratings resemble self-assessment with outsourced certification, transferring systemic risk downstream to retail investors, pension funds, and the public. The Piramal example is explored as a paradigmatic case in which ratings have obscured deep-seated governance vulnerabilities and deferred accountability, underlining the need for structural reforms in rating incentives, liability regimes, and public interest protections.
Category Archives: Activities
Our current activities concentrate on the case of Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Limited (DHFL), India. While exploring and investigating this particular case, we have found that India’s crony ruling party, gangsters, banksters as well as religious gurus and institutions are involved in the same. Therefore, to break such collusion, we have decided to deploy an “all out attack” on the existing paradigm of neoliberal market economy as well as market fundamentalism. ***DISCLAIMER: We have collected all the data from available sources on the internet as given on the official portals of media houses, websites and institutions and organizations. We are not first-hand reporters and hence, we are not liable for any inadvertent error or value-loaded statements made on those portals. All propositions have to be viewed as descriptive assertions on the given point of concern.***
Chaosophy of Credit Ratings: Where’s the Accountability?
This article offers a comprehensive, non-polemical examination of the accountability architecture governing credit rating agencies (CRAs) in India, focusing on CRISIL, CARE Ratings, and ICRA under the SEBI (Credit Rating Agencies) Regulations, 1999 (as amended through 2026). Situating itself in continuity with earlier analyses of Piramal Finance and Piramal Pharma ratings, it maps what CRAs are legally mandated to do, how the issuer-pays model structures incentives, and why regulation centered on process rather than outcomes produces a persistent accountability gap. Drawing on verifiable rating actions, enforcement precedents, and the DHFL collapse as a paradigmatic failure, the article demonstrates how credit ratings—legally framed as professional opinions rather than conclusive, decisive guarantees—shape capital flows and investor behaviour without imposing commensurate liability on agencies when optimism bias, delayed downgrades, or convergence errors materialize. It further shows how an oligopolistic market structure, implicit ratings shopping, and political–corporate crony concentration during the BJP regime dilute reputational discipline, transferring risk downstream to retail and public investors. Incorporating recent regulatory reforms and critiques, including debates on revenue diversification, expanded mandates, and transparency norms, the article argues that legality and compliance have been mistaken for responsibility. In conclusion, it frames India’s credit rating regime as a system of regulation without substantive accountability, where structural design—not isolated misconduct—explains recurring credit failures, and where incremental reforms remain insufficient without a fundamental rethinking of incentives, liability, and public interest protection.
From Issuer Pays to Polluter Pays: Unearthing Piramal Pharma’s Credit Ratings
Piramal Pharma Limited (PPL), demerged from Piramal Enterprises in 2022, enjoys high investment-grade credit ratings (e.g., CARE AA; Stable upgraded July 2025) under the issuer-pays model, which critics claim manufactures trust to enable cheap borrowing despite severe financial strain—Q2 FY26 revenue down ~9% to ₹2,044 crore, EBITDA crashed 44%, net loss ₹99 crore, high leverage (~3x net debt-to-EBITDA), weak interest coverage, and share price falling ~19% from ₹204 (July 2025) to ~₹166 (mid-January 2026). This rating resilience contrasts sharply with the alleged “Digwal massacre” at its Telangana plant: repeated effluent dumping (comprehensively reported by 2018) contaminating water/soil, devastating farmland, and linked to spikes in kidney failures, respiratory issues, and cancers among villagers; despite NGT’s ₹8.3 crore polluter-pays fine (2019), TSPCB closure orders, and weak enforcement, SEBI deemed events non-material post-demerger, reportedly shielded by Ajay Piramal’s substantial BJP donations and crony ties. Echoing the Piramal Finance rating controversy, PPL’s playbook—restructurings to quarantine liabilities, OTC pivot to mask industrial risks, and paid-for “stable” ratings—externalizes financial, environmental, and human costs onto investors and poisoned communities, highlighting the urgent need to dismantle the ratings oligopoly and opaque political funding that sustain such systemic expropriation.
OBMA Statement on Neo-Imperialist Violence: Iran, Venezuela, Palestine
This statement asserts OBMA’s condemnation of neo-imperialist violence in Iran, Venezuela, and occupied Palestine, framing these crises as interconnected expressions of cannibalistic capitalism. It exposes how state repression, militarization, sanctions, and fossil-fuel geopolitics enable genocide, ecocide, and resource plunder. Rejecting technocratic and reformist fixes, OBMA affirms planetary justice, anti-imperialist solidarity, and life-centred transformation through collective struggle and ecological ethics.
One Rupee, Piramal Finance, and the Ruins of DHFL: A Letter to Mr. Ajay Piramal
This open letter to Ajay Piramal interrogates the moral dissonance between Piramal Finance’s “Neeyat” advertising campaign, which celebrates honesty through the return of a single rupee, and the lived reality of DHFL depositors whose life savings were erased through a deeply contested insolvency process. By juxtaposing corporate virtue-signalling with the transfer of nearly ₹45,000 crore of DHFL assets for ₹1, the text argues that legality has been deployed to eclipse legitimacy, and branding to obscure accountability. Situating the DHFL resolution within a wider system of crony capitalism, opaque political financing, captured institutions, and manufactured consent, the letter frames the episode as part of a broader legitimation crisis in BJP-ruled India, where ethics are subordinated to power and proximity. At its core, the piece demands that “conscious capitalism” be measured not by advertisements or philanthropy, but by what is returned to those who trusted, funded, and were dispossessed.
Who Pays, Who Bribes, Who Flees, Who Profits: BJP’s Swelling Coffers Amid Exploding External Debt
Posted on 6th January, 2026 (GMT 06:26 hrs) ABSTRACT India’s neoliberal delusion stands exposed in this searing critique: As the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) amasses an astronomical financial empire—ballooning from modest pre-2014 assets to ₹7,113 crore in cash/bank balances and over ₹10,107 crore in election war chests by late 2025, propelled by ₹6,088 croreContinue reading “Who Pays, Who Bribes, Who Flees, Who Profits: BJP’s Swelling Coffers Amid Exploding External Debt”
When AA+ Means “Ask Again”: Manufactured Ratings, Piramal Finance, and the Credit Ratings Trap
Despite glowing CRISIL AA+/Stable ratings, Piramal Finance’s strength is an illusion built on conflicted issuer-paid ratings, legacy DHFL fraud asymmetries (₹45,000 Cr recoveries valued at Re 1, massive retail haircuts), governance controversies, political proximity, and a backdoor listing that bypassed scrutiny. High ratings enable cheap funding and retail mobilisation—while systematically ignoring forensic risks, related-party issues, and resolution inequities seen in IL&FS, Yes Bank, DHFL. This is systemic: manufactured trust, socialised losses, privatised gains. Ratings are opinions, not guarantees. Demand truth before investing.
Piramal Finance and the Rating Ruse: How India’s Credit Rating Agencies Manufacture Trust to Enable Systemic Expropriation
In India’s deeply captured financial regime under prolonged BJP-NDA rule (2014–2025), credit rating agencies (CRAs)—dominated by the CRISIL-ICRA-CARE triopoly—have degenerated from purported risk sentinels into systemic enablers of crony expropriation, perpetuating a predatory cycle of manufactured trust, retail mobilization, delayed collapse, and elite consolidation. The Piramal Finance–DHFL saga stands as the paradigmatic indictment: investment-grade ratings (AA to AAA) were stubbornly retained despite whistleblower alerts, Cobrapost exposés, and KPMG audits exposing ~₹29,000–34,000 crore in promoter diversions through shells and evergreening, facilitating continued borrowing until 2019 defaults; post-crisis, Piramal—bolstered by dynastic kinship to Mukesh Ambani (via his son’s marriage to Isha Ambani) and alleged political shielding through disproportionate ruling-party contributions—secured DHFL via a sweetheart IBC resolution that controversially valued ~₹45,000 crore in fraud/avoidance recoveries at a nominal Re 1, acquiring the ~₹90,000+ crore portfolio for ~₹37,250 crore while the Supreme Court’s April 1, 2025, ruling vested all future windfalls exclusively in the bidder and condemned ~2.5 lakh retail depositors (mostly middle-class and elderly savers) to brutal 55–77% haircuts, aggregating colossal losses exceeding ₹50,000 crore across similar NBFC failures. Swiftly rebranded as Piramal Finance through reverse merger alchemy, the entity achieved rapid rehabilitation—~₹91,447 crore AUM with over 80% retail pivot, PAT doubling to ~₹327 crore in Q2 FY26, and fortified net worth ~₹27,000 crore—crowned by CRISIL’s fresh AA+/Stable assignment in January 2026 (with A1+ short-term), shaving funding costs by 50–80 bps and unlocking diversified inflows, even as Moody’s Ba3/Stable alone cautioned lingering wholesale exposures (~14%) and volatility. Driven by issuer-pays conflicts, oligopolistic convergence, epistemic blindness to governance rot and political proximity, and implicit “too connected to fail” pricing, CRAs orchestrate performative legitimacy—inflating optics pre-crisis, reacting belatedly post-default (as in IL&FS’s AAA-to-junk plunge and Yes Bank’s pre-moratorium investment-grade persistence), and aggressively upgrading post-consolidation—thereby externalizing ruin onto vulnerable constituencies while privatizing distressed assets for networked oligarchs within a broader architecture of institutional capture, democratic erosion, and cunning capitalism that demands radical rupture: abolishing issuer-pays, imposing personal liability, deconcentrating markets, and centering retail justice to reclaim accountability from this reverse merger republic.
The Bankruptcy Bazaar: How India’s Ill-Conceived Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) Turns Public Money into Private Profits
This article delivers a comprehensive indictment of India’s Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), 2016, exposing it as a structurally predatory regime that facilitates crony expropriation rather than genuine resolution. Through doctrinal analysis, tribunal data, and emblematic case studies—Videocon, Aircel, Essar Steel, Bhushan Power, Reliance Communications, and most starkly DHFL—it demonstrates how time-bound resolution is a legal fiction, recoveries are abysmally low, avoidance provisions are systematically neutralised, and fraud is laundered through procedural finality. The DHFL case emerges as the perfect crime scene: mass dispossession of 2.5 lakh retail savers, assignment of vast avoidance recoveries at notional value to the acquirer, and judicial deference that extinguished constitutional claims. Situated within a wider political economy of crony capitalism and opaque political funding, the IBC is shown not as a failed reform but as rule by plunder—an insolvency regime that has gone rogue.
End of Year Bombshell: How BJP-NDA-Hindutva Failed India – A Scathing 2014-2025 Indictment
As 2025 draws to a close, this comprehensive dossier documents not a series of discrete policy missteps, but a systemic transformation of governance in India (2014–2025): a shift from democratic accountability to political executive dominance; from evidence-based policymaking to manufactured narrative control; from social protection to structural precarity. Spanning the economy, federalism, data integrity, labour, the natural environment, digital freedoms, education, public health, cultural institutions, civil liberties, and fundamental rights, the record reveals enduring patterns of power centralization, calibrated opacity, selective enforcement, and institutional hollowing—accompanied by crony consolidation and the routinized criminalization of dissent. Democratic indicators decline as surveillance infrastructures expand, grassroots welfare erodes, and truth itself is rendered an object of administrative management. This is not a partisan ledger, but a counter-archive: an evidence-grounded indictment that affirms accountability as the necessary cost of power. In closing the year, it calls for a civic reckoning—not to foreclose debate, but to reclaim and restore it.
Once in a Blue Moon Academia 