India's own sub-prime?

I came across this news article in the Economic Times today:

Small towns overtake metros to procure home loans
28 Nov, 2007, 1220 hrs IST,Shankar Raghuraman, TNN
NEW DELHI: Forget the metros; it is the smaller cities in India that are really witnessing a housing boom. Sample this: every fourth household in sleepy Gangtok took a housing loan from a scheduled commercial bank in 2005-06; over one-fifth of all homes in Bhubaneshwar did the same that year. At an average of barely Rs 3.4 lakh per housing loan, the residents of the Sikkimese capital may not be able to match the residents of the metros when it comes to the size of the loan, but in terms of the sheer proportion of families that are borrowing to have a nest they can call their own, small-town India is on the march.

If true, this is absolutely stupendous!! One out of 4/5 households in Gangtok/Bhubaneshwar took a home loan in one year! Is Sikkim or Orissa the new El-Dorado of real estate? Not very likely! Then are these loans justified macro-economically?

The question that springs to mind is - are banks building the platform for a large rise in non-performing loans? Already the more aggressive banks have been hauled up by the judiciary and the media for resorting to intimidatory tactics to recover credit. And anecdotal personal experience tells me that property prices have actually cooled off this year.

Will we too see our very own sub-prime crisis? I would like to find out the dominant banks in Sikkim and Orissa, and short them for a couple of years, once they start feeling the pinch of these excesses - seems like a sure trade to me!!