Sri Lanka is in the grip of a severe economic crisis triggering massive anti-government protests across the country. In this backdrop, many social media users are sharing a post claiming that Sri Lanka is reeling under economic crisis as it took a debt of 95% of its GDP, and India has taken a debt of 83%. The post warns that India will soon go through an economic crisis as its debt amount is just 13% less than Sri Lanka.
The post reads, “श्रीलंका अपनी GDP का 95% कर्ज ले चुका है और मोदी जी 83% बस 13 कदम और उसके बाद हम विश्व गुरु बन जाएंगे NDTV इंडिया News ” (English translation, “Sri Lanka has taken a loan 95% of its GDP and Modi ji has taken 83%, just 13 steps and after that, we will become world guru, NDTV India News.”)
The link to the post can be seen here.
FACT CHECK
NewsMobile did a fact-check and found the claim to be misleading.
On seraching with appropriate keywords, we found that according to a report published in Fortune on April 9, 2022, Sri Lanka’s current debt-to-GDP ratio has skyrocketed in recent years, rising from 42% in 2019 to 104% in 2021.
We also searched for the General government gross debt on the International Monetary Fund website for both India and Sri Lanka.
We found that India had a debt of 90.601% of GDP in 2021, while Sri Lanka had 109.250% debt of GDP. In 2020, Sri Lanka had a debt of 101.235% while India’s figure stood at 89.608%. Here, we can clearly see that Sri Lanka’s debt is more than its GDP, while India’s debt is lower than its GDP. Also, the debt in Sri Lanka has increased by around 8% while in case of India the debt only increased by 1%.
We also found that Sri Lanka’s External Debt is almost the same as its domestic debt.
Also, according to data published by The Reserve Bank Of India dated September 15, 2021, India had a debt of 73.95% of its GDP. India’s external debt is just 2.62% of its GDP, the rest of 71.33% is domestic debt, out of which 26.63% debt is on the state governments and the rest 48.24% debt is on the Centre. Hence, we can see that India’s debt position is different from Sri Lanka.
Based on above data we can evidently conclude that the viral post is fake.
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