Indian home loans float only in one direction—up. Successive Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governors have tried to use a mix of benchmarks, moral-suation and nudges to get the banks to be fair to a set of borrowers who now account for a large part of the banks’ loan books, but loan rates have remained sticky at higher levels. As borrowers, we know the pain of having a loan that gets very quickly revised upwards when the policy rate rises, but stays high when the policy rates fall. Banks have managed to manage all benchmarks tried out every few years by RBI. The BPLR, base rate and the MCLR are the various benchmarks (read about these here) tried out over the past. Each time a new benchmark was introduced, RBI expected banks to pass on the rate cuts, but each time it failed.