Who can access CRILC data

CRILC — the Reserve Bank of India’s Central Repository of Information on Large Credits — is a supervisory reporting system, and access to it follows from that. This page sets out, factually, who reports into CRILC, what access those institutions get, and how the adjacent credit-information rules work.

If you are looking for the description of the system itself, start with What CRILC is.

The rule in one line

Access to CRILC data runs with RBI-regulated lending status. Institutions that the RBI requires to report large exposures into CRILC are the institutions that participate in it. There is no public access tier, no subscription, and no application route for an entity that is not a reporting institution.

Institutions inside the framework

These are the categories the RBI has brought into CRILC reporting.

The common feature is not size or sophistication. It is that each is a lending institution regulated by the RBI, filing a supervisory return about its own book.

The NBFC position specifically

This is the most-asked case, so it is worth stating precisely. Deposit-taking NBFCs and non-deposit-taking systemically important NBFCs were brought into CRILC reporting by the RBI’s Prudential Framework for Resolution of Stressed Assets dated 7 June 2019, which names them among the lenders it applies to. They report borrowers with aggregate exposure of ₹5 crore and above on the same basis as banks.

NBFCs below those categorisations — smaller non-deposit-taking NBFCs outside the systemically important classification — are not within the reporting perimeter.

What “access” actually means for a reporting institution

Being a reporting institution is not the same as having a search box over the whole repository. In practice, participation means:

• An obligation to file. The CRILC-Main return on the prescribed cadence — monthly for commercial banks and the all-India financial institutions, quarterly for urban co-operative banks — plus the weekly report of instances of default by borrowers with aggregate exposure of ₹5 crore and above.
• Supervisory feedback. The RBI provides reporting institutions with data on borrowers, which is the mechanism by which a lender learns of a borrower’s position with other lenders.
• Access within the RBI’s own rules, through RBI-operated channels, by authorised users at the institution. The terms are set by the regulator, not negotiated.

So even inside the perimeter, CRILC is a regulated data flow with a defined purpose, not a general-purpose research tool.

Entities outside the framework

Entities that do not lend under RBI regulation are not reporting institutions and are outside CRILC entirely. That includes, among others:

• advisory, transaction-advisory and syndication firms
• management consultancies and strategy firms
• research desks, asset managers and investment funds that do not hold an RBI lending licence
• corporates assessing customers, suppliers or counterparties
• law firms, accounting firms and rating advisory practices
• technology and analytics vendors serving the lending industry
• non-systemically-important NBFCs below the reporting classification
• students, journalists and academics

There is no eligibility path here to describe, because eligibility is not the mechanism. CRILC participation is an incident of being regulated as a lender, and the RBI does not operate a route by which a non-lender can join.

Where the neighbouring rules sit

CRILC is one of three distinct regimes over Indian credit data, and people searching for CRILC access are often actually navigating between them. Set out plainly:

1. CRILC — RBI supervisory reporting. Reporting institutions file; the RBI supervises and provides feedback. Described above.

2. Credit information companies — the CICRA regime. CIBIL, CRIF, Experian and Equifax operate in India as credit information companies licensed by the RBI under the Credit Information Companies (Regulation) Act, 2005. Section 17(4) of that Act restricts the disclosure of credit information to “specified users” as defined in the Act and its regulations. The specified-user set has been widened over time by regulation, but it remains a defined set, and an entity outside it cannot be sold credit information under that Act.

3. Public disclosures by SEBI-registered credit rating agencies. SEBI’s framework for credit rating agencies requires each agency to publish issuer-specific press releases and rating rationales on its own website, in machine-readable format, and to maintain an archive of those disclosures for at least ten years. Those documents are published to the world, with no user classification attached to them.

Three regimes, three different bases. They are not tiers of the same thing.

What TatvaRatings is

Stated separately, on its own terms.

TatvaRatings is a private database built from the third of those three: the press releases seven SEBI-registered credit rating agencies publish on their own websites. A minority of rating actions — 46.2%, measured as at 29 August 2026 — carry a lender-wise annexure naming the banks behind each rated facility, because that disclosure depends on the issuer’s consent. TatvaRatings parses those releases into structured records and indexes the annexure from the lender’s side, so a query can start with a bank instead of a borrower.

What follows from that, factually:

• It holds no CRILC data and no data from any credit information company.
• It carries no registration, licence, recognition or approval from the RBI or SEBI, and claims none. It is not a credit information company and does not operate under CICRA.
• Its universe is rated borrowers only — 45,528 of them, from 70,337 rating actions, as at 29 August 2026.
• Its lender figures are floors, not totals. 46.2% of rating actions publish an annexure (32,498 of 70,337, as at 29 August 2026), and the rated book is a minority of any lender’s borrowers.
• An annexure reflects the sanctioned position as at the rating action date, on a periodic, broadly annual review cycle — so a typical record is a year or more old.

Those are the terms on which it works. Whether they are useful for your question is yours to judge — Data limits is written so that you can judge it before a conversation rather than after one.

Related

• What CRILC is — the system, the ₹5 crore threshold, SMA reporting
• Coverage — what is actually in the TatvaRatings corpus, with an as-at date
• Data limits — the full specification of what is not covered
• Talk to us