There are currently two different types of power steering systems, electric and hydraulic. The hydraulically-driven power steering is the one we will be discussing today, since it is the only type of assisted steering system that uses power steering fluid and therefore needs to be checked occasionally. The consequences of letting your power steering fluid get low can result in problems with your car’s drivability and its reliability.
The most obvious symptom of low power steering fluid is usually increased difficulty when you attempt to move the steering wheel, one of the signs you need to service your power steering system. This may also be accompanied by noises when you turn the wheel. These noises can mimic a “groaning” sound that can indicate that outside air is mixing with the low power steering fluid level. The usual cause of low power steering fluid is a leak somewhere in the power steering system, since under normal conditions, there should be no fluid loss.
The best way to approach a low power steering fluid issue is to check your power steering fluid reservoir level, following the instructions set forth in your owner’s manual. If the fluid is below the “minimum” mark, top it up with fresh fluid that has not been opened for too long and that is the specific type recommended for your vehicle — and do not overfill it. Drive the car for a while and see whether the steering difficulty and/or noises return. If they do, make a date with your mechanic for some power steering repairs.
What else should you know about your power steering system?
AJKPhotography/Shutterstock
Your hydraulic power steering system consists of an engine-driven pump powered by a drive belt. The power steering pump pressurizes the power steering fluid that is then sent to the steering rack, providing a hydraulically-powered assist that reduces the amount of effort it takes to steer the vehicle along its intended path. The fluid circulates through the system’s hydraulic lines, which send the fluid under high pressure to the steering and return it to the pump at a lower pressure. A fluid reservoir holds additional power steering fluid and enables you to check the proper level of the fluid, which may be one of several different colors.
The first hydraulic power steering system that was similar to the one we have today was invented by Francis W. Davis in 1926. It was initially used in World War II to make heavy military vehicles easier to steer. After the war, the first production car to be fitted with power steering was the 1951 Chrysler Imperial. An extra benefit of power steering was that since the steering effort was reduced, the speed with which the car responded to steering inputs could also be increased, allowing vehicles to be much more responsive and handle better.
Today, the increasing emphasis on fuel economy has driven the auto industry to use electric power steering, or EPS, on an increasing number of vehicles. EPS not only improves fuel efficiency and eliminates the maintenance issues of a hydraulic system, its electronically-based nature also facilitates the use of driver assistance tech like lane-changing and automated parking.
Here’s a number that should stop you mid-scroll: India’s gross NPA ratio hit a historic low of 2.15% as of September 2025 — the lowest level since 2010-11, confirmed by the RBI in its latest Trends and Progress of Banking in India report released December 2025.
Now here’s the number that puts it in context: the absolute gross NPA stock still stood at ₹4.32 lakh crore.
That gap — between a ratio that looks reassuring and an absolute number that demands serious infrastructure — is exactly where India’s debt collection industry lives in 2026. The headline is good. The operational challenge is not over. And the technology being deployed to close that gap is transforming the industry faster than most lenders have internalized.
Understanding India’s NPA story in 2026 requires holding two truths at once.
The first truth: asset quality has genuinely improved. Public sector banks saw their gross NPA ratio fall from 9.11% in March 2021 to 2.58% by March 2025. Net NPAs are at 0.5%. The slippage ratio — which measures fresh loans turning bad — declined for the fifth consecutive year to 1.4% at end-March 2025. By almost every ratio-based metric, this is the healthiest India’s banking sector has been in a generation.
The second truth: the composition of what’s left has changed dramatically. The easy-to-resolve large corporate NPAs have largely been worked through the IBC pipeline. By March 2025, more than 30,000 applications representing underlying defaults of ₹13.78 lakh crore had been settled at the pre-admission stage alone. What remains is a harder, more distributed problem — retail loans, MSME advances, microfinance accounts, scattered across geographies, ticket sizes, and legal jurisdictions. India’s loan book crossed ₹2.2 trillion in FY25, with personal loans alone doubling from 73 million to 146 million accounts in three years.
More loans at smaller ticket sizes, more borrowers who are first-time credit users, more accounts that fall into DPD buckets without the ability to recover through traditional legal channels. The ratio looks good. The recovery work is just beginning.
Technology Has Stopped Being Optional
If 2023 was when collections technology became mainstream, 2026 is when it became existential. The proof is in the adoption curves.
Mid-sized banks observed a 34–36% drop in credit disbursement and collection costs due to AI adoption. Institutions implementing AI-driven collections strategies report recovery rate improvements of 10–25% and significant reductions in operational costs. AI adoption in finance functions has climbed to 59% of firms globally — up from just 37% in 2023.
In India specifically, the pattern is clear: platforms that started with digital nudges and payment reminders have graduated into full-stack recovery infrastructure. Credgenics, which recently partnered with Aye Finance, now combines omnichannel communication with AI-powered borrower scoring, a litigation management system, and an ODR capability — covering the collections lifecycle from the first payment reminder to settlement. DPDZero has built intelligent early-stage workflow automation with strong pre-legal capabilities. Both represent real progress on the front end of the collections funnel.
Industry leaders entering 2026 are clear that AI will act as a major catalyst across servicing, collections, underwriting support, and operational efficiency — with customer-facing adoption following with the right regulatory safeguards in place.
But here is where the story gets more nuanced: most of the AI investment in Indian collections has been concentrated in the 0–90 DPD bucket. The pre-legal stage. The moment a borrower crosses into formal legal territory — a SARFAESI notice, a DRT filing, a Section 138 cheque bounce case — the sophistication level drops sharply. Legal recovery in 2026 is still largely manual at most lenders, tracked through spreadsheets, coordinated over WhatsApp, and measured through gut feel rather than data.
This is the infrastructure gap that defines the next wave of collections technology in India.
Where The Legal Stack Is Breaking
Legal recovery was never meant to be the last resort. Under SARFAESI, lenders have the right to take possession of secured assets without court intervention. Under the IBC, creditors have genuine leverage. Debt Recovery Tribunals were specifically designed to fast-track financial disputes.
The frameworks work. The execution doesn’t — not at scale.
Consider what a legal recovery workflow typically looks like at a mid-sized NBFC with 5,000 NPA accounts: notices are drafted in batches, manually checked, dispatched through India Post without systematic delivery tracking. Court hearing dates live in someone’s calendar. Advocate assignments are based on familiarity rather than performance data. If a case gets adjourned three consecutive times with no action, there’s often no automated alert. The account drifts.
Over 320 new debt recovery platforms launched between 2022 and 2024 offering integrated dashboards, cloud-based workflows, and multilingual customer engagement. Yet very few of these have solved the legal layer — jurisdiction-specific notice templates that pull directly from loan management data, court case tracking that flags at-risk hearings, advocate performance analytics that tell you which empanelled lawyer closes DRT cases fastest in a specific geography.
Platforms built specifically for the collections-to-legal junction are filling this gap. Legodesk’s infrastructure, for instance, is purpose-built around exactly this workflow: legal notice automation with India Post integration and tracked delivery, centralized court case management across DRT, NCLT, and civil courts, and advocate network analytics that surface performance data rather than just contact information. The goal is to make the legal recovery process as operationally tight as pre-legal collections has become — auditability built in, data flowing both ways, outcomes measured.
The Regulatory Ratchet Is Only Moving One Way
The regulatory environment in 2026 is not getting simpler. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, now operationalized through sector-specific guidelines from RBI, SEBI, and IRDAI, has fundamentally changed how lenders must architect their data flows, consent management, and vendor relationships. Regulation is emerging as a structural force rather than a cyclical hurdle for Indian fintechs entering 2026.
In collections specifically, this translates to: contact hour restrictions that require systematic enforcement, documentation requirements that demand automated audit trails, and borrower communication protocols that need to be embedded in the platform rather than left to individual agent discretion.
The lenders best positioned for this environment are the ones who treated compliance infrastructure as a capability investment rather than a cost center. Automated legal notice dispatch — where every notice is templated, timestamped, and tracked — is not just operationally efficient. It is legally defensible in a way that manual processes are not. When the RBI or a DRT asks for evidence of process, a documented digital trail answers that question in minutes. A WhatsApp archive does not.
The Emerging Recovery Ecosystem
One of the more interesting structural shifts in India’s collections space over the last 18 months is the move away from “one platform for everything” thinking toward ecosystem thinking.
Different parts of the recovery journey call for genuinely different capabilities. Pre-litigation resolution through platforms like Presolve360 is creating real value for smaller-ticket disputes — ODR and mediation reduce the burden on formal legal channels for accounts where SARFAESI or DRT proceedings would cost more than the debt itself. Early-stage collections automation from platforms like DPDZero works best when it’s connected to legal escalation triggers rather than operating as an isolated system. Legal management infrastructure like Provakil serves the enterprise legal function well, even where it isn’t collections-specific.
The lenders achieving the best recovery outcomes are not choosing between these. They are building recovery stacks — thinking clearly about what capability handles which stage of the journey, where data needs to flow between systems, and what the handoff protocol looks like when a borrower moves from pre-legal to legal territory.
This ecosystem mindset is relatively new in India. It is where the industry is headed in 2026, and the lenders who get there first are building a durable operational advantage.
What The Number Actually Tells You
Back to that opening statistic. A 2.15% NPA ratio is a genuine achievement — the result of eight years of sustained effort across regulatory reform, IBC implementation, recapitalization, and increasingly sophisticated recovery operations.
But ₹4.32 lakh crore in absolute gross NPAs, sitting in a loan book that is growing at double digits annually, with a retail and MSME composition that requires more distributed, technology-intensive recovery operations than anything India’s collections industry has managed before — that is not a problem that a good ratio solves.
It is a problem that infrastructure solves. And in 2026, the infrastructure is finally being built.
Legodesk provides legal recovery infrastructure for banks, NBFCs, and fintechs — connecting collections workflows with legal notice automation, court case management, and advocate network analytics. Contact us
FAQs
What is India’s current NPA ratio in 2026?
India’s gross NPA ratio reached a historic low of 2.15% as of September 2025, according to RBI data confirmed in February 2026. In absolute terms, gross NPAs stood at approximately ₹4.32 lakh crore as of the same period.
How is AI being used in debt collection in India?
AI is being deployed across predictive default scoring, omnichannel borrower communication, automated legal notice dispatch, and court case management. Mid-sized banks have reported a 34–36% reduction in collection costs after AI adoption, with recovery rate improvements of 10–25%.
What laws govern debt recovery in India?
How is AI being used in debt collection in India? A: AI is being deployed across predictive default scoring, omnichannel borrower communication, automated legal notice dispatch, and court case management. Mid-sized banks have rep
What is the size of the debt collection software market in India?
India’s debt collection software market reached approximately $172.8 million in 2024 and is projected to grow to $456 million by 2033 at a CAGR of 10.48%, per IMARC Group.
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
