🇮🇳 India vs 🇦🇫 Afghanistan

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. India currently owes about 2235.4× as much as Afghanistan — a gap of $3.36 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

Net debt and interest: IMF World Economic Outlook, October 2026, general government, 2025, mostly IMF estimates. A dash means no comparable figure. How these are calculated.

Among the 194 governments tracked here, India ranks 39th by debt-to-GDP and Afghanistan 189th. Measured per person, India is 122nd and Afghanistan 194th.

Analysis

By total government debt, India ranks 8th and Afghanistan 169th among the 194 sovereigns tracked on this site.

On a per-citizen basis the picture can look different from the nominal totals: a resident's notional share of the government debt in India is roughly 66.4× that in Afghanistan ($2,277 vs $34 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: India sits at 84% of GDP, well above Afghanistan's 8%, meaning India owes far more relative to the size of its own economy — even where the nominal, dollar-for-dollar comparison above suggests otherwise.

The IMF publishes no net debt figure for either. India spends about 25% of government revenue on net interest ($200.5 billion in 2025), and Afghanistan about 0.2% ($9 million in 2025). See the full interest ranking.

The gap between them is widening: India's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($3K/sec vs $0/sec for Afghanistan), adding roughly $217,555,200 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: India's population (1.48B) is about 33.7× Afghanistan's (44M), which is part of why the nominal and per-capita comparisons above can point in different directions — a government's debt load scales loosely with the size of both its economy and its population, not either alone.

India and Afghanistan are both grouped under this site's “Asia-Pacific” region, so this is, in effect, an intra-regional comparison as well.

This analysis is generated automatically from live data as an educational orientation, not financial advice — see the methodology page for definitions and caveats.

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