India, March 15 -- Picture this. You have been paying monthly instalments on a credit card that you did not swipe. Someone else charged in your name, years before you even knew about it. That, in simple terms, is what India has been doing with oil bonds since 2005.

This March and April, the Indian government finally cleared the last tranche of Rs1.53 lakh crore in oil bonds. Add in almost two decades of interest, and the total bill reaches Rs3.23 lakh crore. That is one of the largest hidden-debt cleanups in independent India's fiscal history.

So the natural question follows: now that the debt is gone, will petrol and diesel get cheaper? The short answer is not automatically. Here is why. What were these oil bonds, exactly?

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