India’s banks trade old fears for new ones

Akshara· Host0:00

[upbeat music] In today's episode, we'll break down two important stories. First, we talk about banks recovering but having new worries, and then we'll talk about empty recycling plants awaiting a deluge of used batteries. Welcome back to The Daily Brief by Zerodha, where we cut through the noise to help you understand what's actually happening in the most important stories from business and markets. I'm your host Akshara, and today is Thursday, 7th May. Coming to the first story. For four straight quarters now, we've been tracking the same handful of frictions in Indian banking, and every quarter we'd end the piece with a scoreboard of things to watch in the next one, expecting part of the picture to shift. Now, Q4 FY26 is the quarter where it might have shifted. Almost every friction we've been tracking through FY26 has either resolved or quietly evolved. But just as all that good news arrived, banks started behaving like they were preparing for trouble by setting aside provisions for two things. One, the Strait of Hormuz crisis, and two, the possibility that the rate cut cycle might be already over. So this quarter is two stories layered on top of each other. The first story is the resolution of everything we've been tracking, and the second is the new worries that have emerged. Let's go through them. In our Q2 coverage, we saw that corporate growth across the four big private banks was running the mid-single or low double digits. The story was that India's private sector wasn't