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Coverage and grade mix
The big four, and everyone else
CRISIL, CARE, ICRA and India Ratings each cover several hundred issuers and sit overwhelmingly in investment grade. The smaller agencies cover a fraction of that and skew materially lower down the scale, which is worth knowing before you read any single grade in isolation.
CRISIL
CARE Ratings
ICRA
India Ratings
Acuité
Infomerics
BrickworkSecond opinions
Most issuers carry only one
54% of rated issuers are covered by a single agency. There is no second read to check it against, no split to notice, and if that one agency is slow the market has nothing else to go on. Multi-rated issuers are the exception, not the norm.
534
One agency
no second read
306
Two agencies
a cross-check
85
Three agencies
well covered
59
Four or more
the largest issuers
Split ratings
Where the agencies disagree
71 issuers carry two agencies' grades on the same bond that do not match. These are the widest gaps. A split is not an error: it is two houses reading one balance sheet differently, and it tells you the credit is genuinely contested rather than settled.
| Issuer | Higher view | Lower view | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam | A-Brickwork | CInfomerics | 14 notches |
| Indore Municipal Corporation | AA+India Ratings | BB-Brickwork | 11 notches |
| NLC India | AAACRISIL | BB+Brickwork | 10 notches |
| Gujarat State Investments | AAAcuité | BBBrickwork | 9 notches |
| Hella Infra Market | A-Acuité | B+India Ratings | 7 notches |
| Wadhwagroup Holdings | BBB+Infomerics | BBrickwork | 7 notches |
| RDC Concrete(india) | A-Acuité | B+India Ratings | 7 notches |
| IFCI | BBB-CARE Ratings | B+ICRA | 4 notches |
| Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Prasaran Nigam . | A-Infomerics | BB+Brickwork | 4 notches |
| Ptc India Financial Services | AA-Brickwork | A-ICRA | 3 notches |
Compared on the same ISIN, so this is genuine disagreement rather than two different instruments of one issuer sitting at different grades.
How we count
One issuer is one rated relationship, however many bonds it has outstanding. Counting bonds would rank agencies by whose clients happen to run the biggest programmes.
An issuer rated by three agencies counts once for each of them, because those are three separate opinions. That is why rating relationships outnumber rated issuers. Grades are folded to their band, so AA+ and AA- both sit in AA, and short-term grades such as A1+ are left out because they belong to a different scale.
Split ratings are compared on the same ISIN. Comparing an issuer's grades across different instruments invents disagreements that nobody expressed: a bank's written-off perpetual bond sits at D while its senior paper is AA+, and that is a structural difference, not two agencies arguing.