Many states that pass on average fail somewhere in their tail. Pick a credit, then a state, to walk down the tail: holdings of no more than 10 acres, then the 1 hectare tip, then Scheduled Tribe, Scheduled Caste, women-headed and tenant households within the tip. The deepest level that fails is where the shadow is deepest.
Data. NSS 77th Round, Schedule 33.1 (Situation Assessment of Agricultural Households, 2018–19), 58,040 households, both visits; the unit-level data reproduce the published Report 587 figures. Weights: survey multipliers. Tests: two-stage cluster bootstrap within each state (first-stage units, then households), 1,000 resamples, 90 percent intervals. At each split the tail is tested against its frame and against its head; a credit fails if any testable split fails. Groups below 100 households or 20 first-stage units are not testable. Smallholder bound from Ramprasad (2018, Journal of Peasant Studies): no more than 10 acres. Religion is bracketed by design. Data used under MoSPI's terms for non-commercial research.